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Alternative Servers vs. New Repressions

How can we collectively face new laws enforcing data retention on the internet, to prevent our communication structures from becoming the weak points in our activism? How can we build strong user communities around alternative servers, to allow awareness and solidarity in case of problems (since right now, most activists using our services don't realise it's important and won't easily mobilise to defend it)? Possible legal attacks, individual & collective responsability, resistance tactics, etc.

See the more in-depth invitation for this specific discussion. It is available here.

Infrastructure (physical layer)

System administration / core services (system layer)

Tools and applications (application layer)

Server defense / user security (all layers)

Block device encryption for the masses:

The process of encrypting firmly installed hard drives as well as portable storage devices such as USB HDDs and pen sticks is a neccessary prerequisite to create and maintain a (partially) repression safe working environment. As many activists as possible should be using encrypted partitions and file systems. Unfortunately, this is not yet the case for many activists, because it is not easy to set up encrypted file systems in a usable and secure way. It is, however, possible. With the advent of DMCrypt and LUKS encryption it is much easier to create well-manageable encrypted devices. However, knowledge on how this is actually done is still not very well distributed. The most practical question an activist will ask is probably this: "How can I easily transform my current disk drive /partition / file system into an encrypted one?" Is there a definitive answer to this? Can a user oriented, user friendly pictured guide be worked out which will allow an activist with mediocre tech skills to apply these changes to her system herself? Can this be translated? How can this be made a lovable tool (GUI allowing management + showing encryption strength, encrypted tux icon...)? - mentioned as topic in an email by Alster

Alternative community-driven internet access providers

While providing internet access for local communities has mostly been a matter of providing a low-cost solution by sharing access and costs in the past decades, it is now again becoming a neccessity, but for different reasons. European data retention laws allow governments to snoop on who connects to whom, and to retrieve this information from your local Internet access provider, which makes it difficult to work around this information being gathered. This creates a new need for founding local internet access providers. The data retention legislation allows small (less than 1000 users) and non-commercial internet access providers to operate without a need for providing direct 24/7 access to an expensive black box for the snooping activities of the governments. Also, shared accounts and wireless LANs may allow for making it impossible to legally circumvent identification of single internet users. We can also learn from the past and from existing projects here. Reports on how community driven access providing has worked in the past and is working now will be of help in working around issues others have already encountered and overcome. Reforming local internet access communities is a very important counter measure to the growing surveillance activities of organizations which think you are guilty until proven otherwise. - mentioned as topic in an email by Alster

Administration servers etc

exchanging on the way we administrate servers, networks, hacklabs, etc. Which procedures do we use to transform the "root = 1 person" paradigm? - mentioned as topic in an email by Lunar

Mail servers

exchange about practical problems and solutions for maintaining mail servers - mentioned by people from nadir