Personal Update and eAsylum.net Being Reborn

It's been a long time coming, but eAsylum.net is about to be reborn - hopefully before the end of this month. This is because of a few different things.

Personal Update

First off, it would be earlier but I'm also doing work for the WSIS Gender Caucus and their sites - I'm about ready to start everything off with a bang (or as much of a bang as I can) there after reviewing the documentation. So you can get updates on that here, as I can.

Second, there's a lot of stuff that I'm doing for SSC which hasn't come to fruition yet, but will over the next few weeks. Some beta testing going on tonight.

eAsylum.net

The truth is that I desperately need an outlet where I don't have to negotiate with a team and do what I enjoy. eAsylum.net started off with a bang with the Free Culture Wikipedia Remix, which did make the New York Times in print but was never as acclaimed as a bunch of people reading the book out loud. That's fine. So similar things will happen on eAsylum.net once I can find robust hosting of the site outside of the United States.

eAsylum.net is going to need bandwidth. It will accumulate a few key people doing similar things and completely off the wall things. I'm also considering implementing Burrokeet for some of these things on a subdomain, so that those who wish OpenOffice/PDF files can also get them. But one step at a time - once I find a good host, I can do the Drupal upgrade and go from there.

Ideas on broadband hosts outside the U.S.?

Some people are probably wondering why it is that I am willing to go with a host outside of the U.S. That's a fair question, and one that deserves to be answered: The truth is that I don't like the role that the U.S. played with the Indymedia servers, and I'm not really fond of the fact that laws are being passed in the United States where there are issues related to what I consider to be censorship. So, while I am sorry that this is happening, I don't really want to have to worry about some content inadvertently causing legal problems in the dynamic environment of the U.S. legal system which has demonstrated repeatedly that Free Speech is as misunderstood as Free Software - perhaps even more so.

What I have found with shopping around for server sites is that many of them do not have an address listed on their site, which is somewhat aggravating. Doing a WHOIS on the domain doesn't tell you anything accurate either - it's just the address that someone typed in and is not verified - a reason that SPAMmers are able to do as much damage as they can. The registration process for websites has distinctive problems with that; they don't even check against the address of the credit card that is billed - and they don't ask questions.

So that's a problem. I don't want to give some company money when they cannot publish a physical address. And what's bad there is that a physical address on a website could be faked as well. But at least it would show that they are interested in proving that they have a location.

If anyone has ideas for hosting that can handle a Gigabyte of bandwidth a month or up where the servers are outside of the United States, I hope you'll post a comment.