January

Report from Riseup

We’ve been working on various efforts to swap things around to get rid of old servers that were running our internal infrastructure. We have been working on updating things to keep them current and now have a ruby 1.9 version of our user.riseup.net, and that works well.

We’ve been working on our physical security, installing much better locks on our cabinets and that kind of thing.

And we were pretty worried after that whole Lavabit thing – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit – and have been expecting to be next. But we haven’t had any secret orders, or non-secret orders, to do anything.

This either means

• we think too much of ourselves,
• we are owned already (and don’t know it),
• they are just slow, or
• they know that we will not abide and their whole artifice will come tumbling down around them (see first element in the list).

What You Must Know About Viruses

Viruses always fake the return address. Viruses will appear to come from people you know, yourself, system administrators, or other people you might trust.

There are several very common viruses which pretend to come from riseup.net “staff” (or the staff of whatever the mail domain happens to be). These viruses threaten to close your account unless you take immediate action by opening the attachment (and thereby infecting your computer). Don’t be fooled!

Viruses always fake the return address. OK, we just said that, but it bears repeating.

If you receive a notice that a message you sent has a virus, you can almost always ignore this. Again, since viruses fake the return address, all this means is that someone else is infected and is sending out viruses which appear to be from you.

So how did the virus get your address? The virus infected a computer which has sent you mail or which you have sent mail to, or it has pulled your address from a web page somewhere.

Do not open attachments from anyone, including people you know, unless you know specifically that they were going to send you an attachment.

We here at riseup.net will NEVER send you any mail with an attachment.

Wanna know more? Like how to install a spam filter and other useful stuff? Viruses

The Littlest Bird!

The mighty Sunbird, along with his lovely partner, have a new baby named after the wind and stars, and we wish them all the best in all the things that change and grow when babies come along.

Thanks

Thanks for all the little and big donations we got during our annual fundraising drive. You all are our sun and moon. And if anyone else feels like donating, please, please do because that means we’ll be able to support more users in better ways. Thanks. Donate