MemeStreams was down for about fifteen hours today. Sorry about that; My bad. An OS update screwed things up pretty badly.

The MemeStreams code is about 13 years old. It has dependencies that no one maintains packages for anymore. Hence, much of what the site runs on needs to be built manually from source. Maintaining it on top of modern Linux distributions is non-trivial. It's sort of a nightmare.

In general, the site has languished. We haven't made any improvements in almost ten years. At one point, it was pretty cutting edge, arguably ahead of it's time. Now, it's a memorial to itself.

And as far as I'm concerned, that's OK.

Even though I haven't posted to the site in a long time, I still give it love regularly. Or at least, just enough love to ensure it sticks around. A part of that is pride, in that I poured a huge amount of energy into this thing over the years. But the core reason is respect for the people who used this site and poured their passion into posts and dialog. This little corner of cyberspace saw some real action. There was ample discussion about wars, foreign policy, politics, economics, infosec, et cetera. Before Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook took over, there was something really special here for a handful of us. I like knowing all that content is still "out there".

MemeStreams is a shit show these days, and it's going to remain one because Decius and I have no time to do anything about it. Yet, we do intend to maintain it's presence indefinitely.

We could use a little luck though.. We never seem to have any...

On Jan 18th, sites will go dark to protest the internet censorship bills.

MemeStreams will be joining the strike on January 18th.

STRIKE AGAINST SOPA

From Decius:

As many of you know, about two months ago TI sent me an email referencing the DMCA and demanding that I take down one of my blog posts. I complied at the time, but I also sent TI a response, requesting that they reconsider their position. They did not respond.

Two weeks ago Jennifer Granick at the Electronic Frontier Foundation sent TI an email on behalf of myself, and several other bloggers who received similar notices from TI. In that email Jennifer told TI that we would repost our censored blog posts today if TI did not respond and clarify their position. TI has not responded.

Therefore, the original blog post has been restored, and if you didn't read it before, you can read it now. Its hardly the best post I've ever written. It was jotted down at 9:30 in the morning while I was getting ready for work. I tend to shoot first on this blog and ask questions later, and that certainly leads to posts which are poorly articulated and easily misinterpreted. In a later post I did a much better job explaining the technical concept which drew my interest to this calculator key cracking effort in the first place.

I'd like to thank the EFF and particularly Jennifer Granick for working with me as well as the other bloggers in this case. My blog post is not important, but it is important that people have a right to blog without worrying about receiving legal threats when they haven't done anything wrong. Its important that people stand up for that right, and we're fortunate that there are people out there who are willing to do it. Thank you EFF.

The post TI censored has been reposted.

TI’s response has been to target programmers and bloggers with cease and desist letters telling them that the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act require them to take down the keys, remove links to forum discussions, and delete blog posts.

The law, however, is not on TI's side.

EFF on the DMCA takedown MemeStreams received.

Hey, TI, Leave Those Kids Alone | Electronic Frontier Foundation

If you are seeing this message, you are using MemeStreams on the new server.

Enjoy! Let us know if you spot any problems.

MemeStreams will be moved to a new server sometime tonight. The exact time is in flux. I'll post an update when we fixate the time.

Be sure to take time today to embrace the slowness of the site. Tomorrow it will no longer be an issue.. hopefully.

Update: This has been pushed back until later in the week.

Against my objections, Nick proceeded. At the time he believed, for some reason, that we were going to make more money than we were going to make. We concluded that we would not book the revenue until we actually received money from Google. In some respects it was an experiment - how much would this bring in? As I predicted, it brought in next to nothing. After several years we have not generated enough revenue to reach the minimum amount that prompts Google to cut you a check.

This is a lie. We current have $784.78 owed to us by Google. We have the adsense account configured not to send us payments and hold the money. There is currently no legitimate way to take the revenue since Industrial Memetics isn't setup properly.

It is true that the current level of ad revenue is not enough to fully cover the current operational costs of the site. However, we current have enough money sitting there to cover over a year of the site's operation. We are over-paying for the server and bandwidth that the site is currently running (slowly) on.

This morning I've been working on getting a copy of MemeStreams running on a $38/mo slicehost VM. It's running faster than this one at a third the operational costs.

It's currently available for testing on the memestreams.org domain. Poke at it if you like.. It still needs some work before being ready to move the site to it.

RE: Decius and Rattle have reached an impass

Short and sweet...

Tom is refusing to legitimize operations of this site and the organization that claims to own it. The Industrial Memetics C Corp is basically a shell corporation that has never been setup or managed properly. All efforts I have made to correct this have been met with resistance or refusal. Everything related to MemeStreams is in Tom Cross's personal name. Tom has been paying all expenses out of his own pocket. I have been insisting for several years now that we legitimize Industrial Memetics, create a bank account to pay expenses out of, and keep records of expenses.

Basically, the house has been run improperly... Whenever the topic of "why don't you pay expenses?" has come up, the answer has been the same.. Legitimize operations and I (share expense|inject capital).

After an argument on the street in downtown Bethesda, where I presented Tom with several options for handling this issue, it came down to "take it all over or I'm shutting it down". I refuse to let this site die.

As per our shouted agreement, I'm going to take over the site's operations starting Monday. I don't expect this to be a problem, assuming that Decius doesn't create one. Domain ownership transfer and database sync'ing, etc..

I intend to form a new organization to care for the site as a 501.(c)3 and open source the code.

I know I have not been posting often recently. There are multiple reasons for this. I assure you none of them involve a lack of care for this community and what we've created together. Tom and I have our differences, but he is and always will be central to the soul of this community.... Unless he intends to run away from it.

The social network section of the site had not been updating properly for about two months. It's fixed now.

The display problems with MemeStreams in Firefox 3.0b5 have been resolved.

Firefox 3 is so standards compliant that the non-standard HTML we use over at Industrial Memetics broke it. Someday we will get some standards.

It's been tested so far with Firefox 3, Firefox 2, Safari 3, and IE7. Let me know anyone experiences any further display problems.