<nettime> nettime and kein

[florian schneider <fls@kein.org>]

dear nettimers,
dear florian cramer!

please accept our apologies for not having introduced the KEIN.ORG
project earlier. the migration of the nettime-l mailinglist was done
in a rather ad-hoc fashion. after the transition from thing.net to one
of the kein.org servers appeared to have worked out quite seemless, we
missed the opportunity to present to you the new home of the majordomo
wrapper script that each day delivers a bunch of messages to your
inbox.

but before, allow us to quickly get some nettime related whois
records straight -- just in order to avoid misunderstandings, hasty
conclusions or panic attacs.

"nettime-l" is a mailinglist using majordomo, a mailinglist manager
that was very popular when the nettime mailinglist came into being.
if you have a look at the raw source or long header of one of
the nettime messages you will see that since mid july it gets
delivered from LIST.KEIN.ORG which is actually running on one of our
servers collocated by the dutch service provider XS4ALL. [if you are
interested in the domain name records of NETTIME.ORG you may use dig
and whois from any unix shell or use one of the many webinterfaces of
any given reseller]

KEIN.ORG is based on a network of servers located in several
countries. Originally the project emerged out of the campaign "KEIN
MENSCH IST ILLEGAL" (no one is illegal) back in 1997. After setting
up the campaigns website we started to share and multiply the
knowledge of how to run your own web- and mail servers with friends
and interested people. soon we began hosting related projects,
activist sites or art projects. at the moment we are running ten
servers that provide the basic infrastructure for several hundred
domains, websites, blogs, content management systems, and countless
email-accounts and mailinglists - just to name the most popular KEIN
services.

one of the particular characteristics of KEIN.ORG has always been
and will remain the fact that the services are provided for free and
in a collaborative fashion. we believe that in times of a rampant
monopolization and concentration of commercial services it is
essential to rely on a self-organized, independent infrastructure
and to know how to run it in a way that is not reproducing the usual
division of labor between content producers and mystified technicians
with all its subsequent dissapointments. it also means that "quality
of service" is the result of pragmatic learning experiences of working
together across different registers.

we are closely connected to similar projects which are doing related
work in europe and beyond and we are constantly exchanging experiences
and developments not only in the context of open source content
management (i.e. with the drupal community) or multimedia file sharing
(namely the V2V project)... if you are interested in a short history
of KEIN.ORG please have a look at <http://kein.org/about>

we are very honored to offer our modest resources to the nettime-list
which for me has been a great source for inspiration since its very
beginning. the extraordinary feedback from the nettime community has
been shaping every new project we were setting up over the past ten
years and we appreciate that a lot. we are really happy to be able to
give something back after having received so much from you all.

over the past few months we had to realize that a lot of privacy and
security related concerns have been raised mostly by some of our
german-speaking users. this seems to be clearly related to the most
recent waves of police raids and arrests around the G-8 meeting in
heiligendamm, last june. we see an urgent need to clarify, discuss,
re-evaluate and strategize these issues in a concentrated, well
thought-out and collaborative fashion.

at the same time we should be aware of the danger of propagating
further confusion and panic. this would fulfill exactly the purpose of
random raids and arrests and play into the hands of those who have a
manifest interest on an atmosphere of insecurity and fear.

we do not think it would be very "wise" to move internet servers
now out of germany or reconsidering seriously whether to operate a
mailinglist like nettime under a domain name that was registered using
a german address or not. on the contrary, we think it is eminently
important to claim our rights for free communications and freedom of
knowledge and to struggle for them instead of giving them up all to
early or in some cynical fashion.

this certainly implies a careful analysis of the circumstances that
made it possible why apparently german prosecutors seem to be that
much fascinated by the possibilities offered by search engines and
tag clouds so that they assume collating some foreign buzzwords could
provide enough evidence to arrest the author of a webpage published in
1998 and charge him with terrorism almost ten years later.

again the conclusion will not be not to mention incriminated words
like "gentrification" anymore. on the contrary and no matter what
prosecutors google across, it seems to become increasingly important
to open up and care for spaces where one can call wickedness by its
own terms -- even without a trusted certificate and without troubling
too much about who the hell might copy and paste it.

more soon!

/fls





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