Item 113. Minutes of July 1999 Grex Board of Director's Meeting Jan Wolter (janc) Tue, Jul 27, 1999 (23:48). 154 lines, 43 responses. Cyberspace Communications July 1999 - Board of Director's Meeting Minutes Presiding: John Remmers (remmers) Recording: Jan Wolter (janc) Other Board Members: Mark Conger (aruba) Dan Gryniewicz (dang) Scott Helmke (scott) Steve Andre (steve) Misti Tucker (mta) Members of the Public: Mary Remmers (mary) Jim Deigert (jdeigert) Cindi Keesan (keesan) Greg Fleming (flem) AGENDA ITEM 1: Gavel Banging - At 7:10pm John Remmers called the meeting to order. AGENDA ITEM 2: Chairman's Report - John Remmers reported that he has nothing to report. AGENDA ITEM 3: Treasurer's Report - Mark Conger presented the monthly treasurer's report for June. The full report is available on-line in coop item 110. * June was our seventh consecutive month in the black (though this is still partly due to the phone tax refund). Total Income: $668.00 Total Expenses: $128.84 New Members: 2 * We currently have 92 members, 82 of which are fully paid up. This is lower than it has been for a while. * Our bank balance is at $5340.29, which may be the highest it has ever been. - Mark Conger presented a preliminary report for July. Looks to be profitable, but only because of the phone tax rebate. July will be the last month of reduced phone bills. Income to Date: $379.00 Expenses: $216.07 AGENDA ITEM 4: Publicity Committee Report - Misti Tucker, the Publicity Czar, reported nothing to report. AGENDA ITEM 5: Technical Committee Report - STeve Andre reported on the death of the /a drive. Luckily, Scott Helmke was able to complete a backup before it completely gave up the ghost, so no data was lost. The old drive was replaced with one donated by Fame. The restore ran into problems due to inadequacies in the restore program. Marcus Watts did some reprogramming to enable the restore to be completed. - Fame donated seven new disk drives and assorted drive enclosures to Cyberspace Communications. This means we now have 16 spare 2 gig disk drives, and plenty of professional quality drive enclosures to put them in. Staff intends to put more on line soon. - Paul Southworth donated various stuff, including a spare tape drive of the same sort we are currently using, and various PC components, including 486 processors and motherboards. - Scott Helmke says the power meter is still too peculiar to use. He will be taking another power measurement soon. AGENDA ITEM 6: ACLU Suit - A hearing was held in which the ACLU asked for a temporary injunction. If granted this would prevent Michigan's new Internet Censorship Act (Michigan Public Act 33 of 1999) from going into effect on the scheduled date of August 1, 1999. Jan Wolter was called as a witness. John Remmers, Steve Gibbard, Mark Conger, and STeve Andre attended. It appears to have gone extremely well, and everyone is confident that the injunction will be granted. The ruling will be announced before August 1. - There still needs to be a trial to determine the constitutionality of the law. This is likely to happen 6 to 9 months from now. - Although we think it almost a certainty that the injunction will be granted, the board felt it would be prudent to have a plan of action in place in case it was not. Figuring out whether Grex can continue to operate in any way under this law is going to be extremely difficult and will probably require getting legal advice on a number of points. We don't want to go to the trouble of formulating this plan unless we need it. Mary Remmers proposed that if this law comes into force, Grex should temporarily shut down while a policy is worked out. This lead to the following motion by Jan Wolter: In the event that Michigan Public Act 33 of 1999 goes into effect, all public access to Grex shall be suspended, with the exception of an informational web page, pending the formulation of new policies. Seconded by Dan Gryniewicz. Passed 7-0-0. Again, we do not think there is any large chance of this happening, and we think that it may be possible to bring at least a few services (like Email) back on line pretty soon. AGENDA ITEM 7: Credit Card Info - Mark Conger has received the applications materials for setting up a web credit card account for Grex. There are some oddities though: * They increased our expected monthly charges to $4500, which is way more than we are likely to charge in any month. We don't know if this is a problem. Dan Gryniewicz has calls in to find out about this. * In addition to paying money to the bank, we also have to pay money to the company that does the charges over the web. That company wants a credit card number that they can charge our fees to. Cyberspace Communications doesn't currently have one. Mark will check to see if we can get one from our bank. - There is a minimum monthly fee to be paid to the bank. Because of this, we'd probably need to gain about 7 new members for this to be a break- even deal for us. We aren't all that confident that it is going to work that well, but we still want to try it. AGENDA ITEM 8: Future Planning Meeting. - John Remmers has been sending Email around to try to find a date for the future planning meeting. Currently looks like it might be early in September. AGENDA ITEM 9: New Business - Mark Conger has written a membership FAQ. This is at http://www.cyberspace.org/memfaq.html - There was some discussion of what constitutes valid ID for members. There is an old policy saying that it should give name and at least one other piece of identifying information. This policy seemed to be OK with everyone, and it was felt that the bank account number on a check or a credit card number would count as identifying information. AGENDA ITEM 10: Gavel Cessation - John Remmers adjorned the meeting at 8:21pm 43 responses total. ---------- (113) #1 John Ellis Perry Jr. (jep) Wed, Jul 28, 1999 (10:39). 40 lines. I'm shocked that Grex is going to shut down if the ACLU's lawsuit doesn't produce immediate enough results. It seems there are steps that could be taken short of that, such as removing obscene material posted on-line. If it shuts down, I don't see how it could ever come to be started up again. There would be no way to have the users communicate to come up with ideas on what to do next. The Board made a flamboyant decision, not a responsible one. Now, how about some suggestions as to how to save Grex from this lunacy. The decision has been made. If it comes to be implemented, there is a need for a plan to recover from it. It would have been better to make that plan first, but it's too late for that. 1) Collect alternative e-mail addresses so people can get together 2) There is a Grex conference on M-Net, just as there is an M-Net conference here. M-Net hasn't panicked yet, and so I presume it will still operate after August 1. The fws are steve, remmers and popcorn. The conference is in need of an item #1, so if one of you could start it *now*, maybe someone can move the relevant discussion over there, thus preserving it for the Grex shut-down. 3) Maybe there's another on-line meeting forum, such as Chinet, or armidalesoftware.com, where people could collect, in case M-Net shuts down, too. 4) An announcement of a meeting somewhere on August 1, so people can come and commiserate, volunteer to replace the Board, etc. in case Grex is shut down. 5) We have 3 days to discuss other possible plans. Obviously if there was any sense that Grex might really shut down on July 31, this could have begun by now. There was no serious discussion, so now the rest of us have been forced by the Grex Board to be in panic mode, too. Sorry, folks, for my apparent disrespect, but this was not well handled. At all. ---------- (113) #2 Scott Helmke (scott) Wed, Jul 28, 1999 (11:19). 2 lines. The shutdown proposed is only TEMPORARY, until board can decide what to turn back on. One option would be to censor conf. items as needed, etc. ---------- (113) #3 Pete Vassoff (pfv) Wed, Jul 28, 1999 (11:47). 7 lines. Conferences, email, attachments, party.. hehehe - the fun never ends ;-> Let's license the users & tatoo id's on 'em ;-) Ideas (and pictures) are as dangerous as immobile cars and guns ;-> ---------- (113) #4 Cell Block 311 (cb311) Wed, Jul 28, 1999 (11:54). 7 lines. Censorship is evil. I can't believe the position of the board sometimes. Do you really think this bill will hold water? Look at the telecommunications decency act and what happened there. Do you really think this bill if turned into law would be enforcable? I am not worried in the least. This bill will get shot down like all other similar ones and we can all go on with our wonderful free lives. ---------- (113) #5 Pete Vassoff (pfv) Wed, Jul 28, 1999 (11:55). 1 line. Stop bursting my ballon, goddamnit.. ---------- (113) #6 It is I the Dutch guy (clees) Wed, Jul 28, 1999 (11:59). 14 lines. Maybe it would be possible to bypass the l+aw by requiring membership, and thus creating a 'private society/club'. This at least should keep out a lot of people. I don0t know how things work in the States, though, but that's more or less the many laws are bypassed in the Netherlands. At least it should keep out a lot of people that merely want to take free profit from the services of grex. If everybody else is as hooked on grex as I am, there should be a hige response to it, and so keep the mandatory fees low. Yet, as far as I can recall the declaration of principles stated by Grex, this contradicts with the very foundation of Grex. But, maybe it could be an option if things turn out for the worst. Rick ---------- (113) #7 John Ellis Perry Jr. (jep) Wed, Jul 28, 1999 (12:10). 9 lines. re #2: I could see that the shutdown is intended to be temporary. What I don't see is how restarting the system would be done, how the users could be involved or know about it, or the procedure for making any decisions at all after the shutdown. I also don't see why there was no real advance discussion of this radical step. If it was being considered by Board members in advance, it should have been discussed on-line. If it wasn't -- which is the way it seems to me -- then the Board made a hasty, wild leap. ---------- (113) #8 David Cahill (dpc) Wed, Jul 28, 1999 (12:11). 2 lines. See now Item 114, in which I have made a motion to rescind the resolution the Board adopted. ---------- (113) #9 Cell Block 311 (cb311) Wed, Jul 28, 1999 (12:20). 2 lines. Lets just make grex a haven for pornography as a means to raise a lot of money. ---------- (113) #10 Ryan Antkowiak (ryan) Wed, Jul 28, 1999 (12:24). 9 lines. Perhaps, if the ALCU's case fails, then Grex could "censor" material. Censorship really sucks, but it's better than the alternative--no grex at all. Censorship of stuff wouldn't be as difficult to implement as it may seem. A simple party filter and a modification to 'more' and 'less' for bbs reading wouldn't be very difficult--because stuff like that is done on april 1st every year. Valerie usually sets this up, and knows how to do this, using some perl script and a lot of 'sed' commands. You could translate all "four letter words" to just X's ---------- (113) #11 Steve Gibbard (scg) Wed, Jul 28, 1999 (17:59). 15 lines. There doesn't appear to be much of a serious possibility that the injunction will be denied. The judge has made it clear that he will issue his ruling on the preliminary injunction before August 1st. However, if upheld, this law is pretty clear in that it would subject the board and staff to a tremendous amount of liability (including jail time) if Grex were to continue operating. I wasn't at the meeting, but I'm assuming that this was probably an outgrowth of a "what if" discussion, in which it was probably deemed pointless to try to figure out how to comply with such a hard to comply with law, given that the chances of our having to comply with it are almost none. I'm sure that if the board's worst fears are realized and this law does go into effect, they will try to get Grex up in some sort of workable condition as soon as possible. One possibility would be to bring Grex up with only one conference item, just for discussing what to do. Such a thing would be monitorable pretty easily. Monitoring all the conferences would be much harder. ---------- (113) #12 C. S. McGee (cmcgee) Wed, Jul 28, 1999 (19:11). 3 lines. Someone help me here. Is it just the conference postings staff would be liable for? Is email content at issue? If email isn't at issue, could it be kept running? ---------- (113) #13 Ryan Antkowiak (ryan) Wed, Jul 28, 1999 (21:24). 3 lines. Or you could just put something in the /etc/issue.net file (or whatever it's called in SunOS, but that's what it is in linux) saying "if you are a minor, please disconnect now. you may be subjected to whatever..." ---------- (113) #14 Tim P. Ryan (tpryan) Thu, Jul 29, 1999 (19:05). 4 lines. I thought the idea was that for the staff/volunteers Grex has, it cannot monitor postings or private directories, nor does it want to. Kinda like providing the forum for Free Speech, even though you might not like some of what you hear or see. ---------- (113) #15 Jan Wolter (janc) Thu, Jul 29, 1999 (22:36). 17 lines. I'm not sure why this motion came to a shock to anyone. We've been telling people for months that if this law came into force it would shut us down. That's why we are in the lawsuit. What? Didn't you believe it? As it happens, the injunction was granted. This motion could still take effect if we ultimately lose the lawsuit though. Yes, it would be hard to start Grex back up. But the inability of people to discuss what to do about it is the least of the problems. I don't know anyway Grex can be run in compliance with this act. We could probably bring up some moderated forums to discuss things. We might be able to give at least some of our users access to their email. We'd have to consult with an attorney. It would take time to figure these things out. If the ruling had gone the other way, we would have had three days - not enough time. ---------- (113) #16 John Ellis Perry Jr. (jep) Fri, Jul 30, 1999 (10:30). 4 lines. Why shouldn't people be shocked? The Board never thought of it at all, until Monday. It didn't bother to notify anyone until 4 days before the shutdown would take effect, and the notification was only in passing, in the Board meeting minutes. ---------- (113) #17 STeve Andre' (steve) Fri, Jul 30, 1999 (10:43). 5 lines. Ah John, as soon as I heard about this law going into effect it occured to me that we might have to shut it down. I never pooled people back then about what they saw as possibilities for the future, but I can't imagine that others didn't have that thought too, given our open nature and the idiotic and paranoid nature of this law. ---------- (113) #18 John Ellis Perry Jr. (jep) Fri, Jul 30, 1999 (10:57). 2 lines. Why the surprise motion, then? Why not discuss it in advance, with the participation of everyone? ---------- (113) #19 STeve Andre' (steve) Fri, Jul 30, 1999 (11:29). 4 lines. Thats the best point I think you've made so far, John. I agree that it would have been best to talk of this first, in coop. So why didn't we? I suppose you could call it oversight of a collective sort, for both the board and the users. ---------- (113) #20 Jan Wolter (janc) Fri, Jul 30, 1999 (11:39). 20 lines. Because we were too busy fighting the law to lay out policy to cover us in the unlikely event that we lost the case. Between writing declarations and press releases, arguing the case on line, and preparing and giving testimony, the board has been doing a lot. It's only after our part of the fight was more or less over that we got around to wasting some time thinking about the what we should do if we lost. I call this "wasting time" because (1) it was and is extremely unlikely, and (2) if it does happen, our goose is basically cooked and there isn't much to do. Ideally we would have discussed this long in advance, but we didn't and we were down to the wire so we made a decision - if things go against us, we'll suspend things while we think about what to do. Frankly, I think spending energy on such a discussion instead of fighting the bill would not have been very constructive. We were concerned that some people would overreact. If we wrote a policy telling what we would do if Grex was hit by lightning, we'd probably have people running around in circles saying "Help! Help! Grex is going to be hit by lightning! How will I read my Email?" ---------- (113) #21 Marcus Watts (mdw) Fri, Jul 30, 1999 (18:32). 12 lines. This law, in essence, makes it impossible to operate a system like grex. The teeth in this law would make each board member personally and criminally liable for the actions of each and every grex user. I think the board had both an abstract ("it's against the law") and a concrete ("my ass is on the line") reason for deciding to shut grex down - I do not see any other responsible or rational decision they could have made. It also appears *extremely* unlikely that this case will ever come to happen, so I think it's also perfectly reasonable for the board to decide "we won't decide what to do until we have to". We could also be making contigency plans in case the martians invade earth, or in case Y2K results in the nation-wide permament failure of the phone system, as these plans have approximately the same chance of happening. ---------- (113) #22 TS Taylor (tsty) Sun, Aug 1, 1999 (13:42). 1 line. ..wha? come on! go sit in the back of the bus, "it's the law." ---------- (113) #23 Daniel Gryniewicz (dang) Tue, Aug 3, 1999 (17:02). 13 lines. What's wrong with abstractly supporting "the law"? I abstractly support "the law" because I realize what a horrible place to live this world would be without it. I also support challanging laws. We even have a legal way of doing it. I fully support that legal way of challanging the law. Except in extreme circumstances, I don't usually support illegally challanging the law. It's a very useful institution, and I would miss it if it weren't there. ---------- (113) #24 Steve Gibbard (scg) Wed, Aug 4, 1999 (14:58). 10 lines. A biography I was reading of Thurgood Marshall contained a point about Marshall's feelings towards Martin Luther King that is probably relevant to this discussion. Marshall apparrently really resented King, largely because he felt that King wasn't doing all that much and was getting a lot of credit that should have been Marshall's, but also because he strongly disagreed with King's civil disobedience approach. Marshall largely based his approach to the Civil Rights movement on the principle that racial discrimination was illegal in the US, and that the courts just needed to make the state and Federal governments follow the law. At that point, he believed that breaking the law while demanding that the laws be enforced was hypocritical. ---------- (113) #25 Kevin Albaugh (albaugh) Wed, Aug 4, 1999 (18:49). 3 lines. Much thanks to Scott & Marcus re: a seamless disk replacement and file system restoration. Curious: In this day & age, why does a disk go bad? (Maybe it watched TV before age 2? ;-) ---------- (113) #26 STeve Andre' (steve) Wed, Aug 4, 1999 (20:16). 7 lines. Disks go bad then they've been used a bunch. Grex really REALLY uses its disks. The last two /a disks have lasted about two to three years. This last one lasted 24,000 hours, but was one of the most heavily used disks on Grex. Grex pushes everything to its limits; disks will continue to die faster with us than in a home situation. The huge mean time between failure numbers that you see today are all theoretical calculations, and not the same conditions that Grex puts on things. ---------- (113) #27 David Brodbeck (gull) Wed, Aug 4, 1999 (20:55). 1 line. I've always wondered what relationship to reality those numbers have. ---------- (113) #28 STeve Andre' (steve) Thu, Aug 5, 1999 (01:27). 2 lines. For most purposes, they aren't bad. But something like Grex is just too strange. ;-) ---------- (113) #29 Jan Wolter (janc) Tue, Aug 10, 1999 (12:52). 1 line. I've always wondered what relationship to reality Grex has. ---------- (113) #30 E R Bassey (other) Wed, Aug 11, 1999 (02:42). 1 line. grex is reality's third cousin, once removed. on the maternal side. ---------- (113) #31 prohibited where (void) Sun, Aug 29, 1999 (09:32). 3 lines. is that it? i had always thought of grex as something more like reality's holding tank. :) ---------- (113) #32 E R Bassey (other) Thu, Sep 2, 1999 (01:03). 1 line. reality is locked up in grex until reality gets sober? ---------- (113) #33 prohibited where (void) Thu, Sep 2, 1999 (08:18). 2 lines. ummm...people hang out on grex till they can deal with reality again. ---------- (113) #34 Jerome Tonneson (jerome) Thu, Sep 2, 1999 (10:53). 1 line. reality? never heard of it. ---------- (113) #35 Jan Wolter (janc) Fri, Sep 3, 1999 (21:10). 2 lines. If you're having problems with reality, I can recommend you a good realtor. ---------- (113) #36 (still a) Wing Nut (hhsrat) Fri, Sep 3, 1999 (23:25). 1 line. As long as said realtor is not named Ed, I need some reality advice. ---------- (113) #37 E R Bassey (other) Sat, Sep 4, 1999 (19:52). 2 lines. you have a problem with surovell, eric? ed seems like a nice enough guy to me, though he seemed a little tipsy when last i saw him... ---------- (113) #38 Big Snauf (lilmo) Fri, Sep 10, 1999 (21:11). 2 lines. Is it just me, or did this discussion take a sudden turn somewhere in the mid-20's? *grin* ---------- (113) #39 Don Joffe (don) Sat, Sep 11, 1999 (11:05). 2 lines. You're right... just goes to show how reluctant people are to talk about this issue. ---------- (113) #40 (still a) Wing Nut (hhsrat) Sat, Sep 11, 1999 (20:53). 1 line. Yes, I have a problem with Surovell ---------- (113) #41 Big Snauf (lilmo) Tue, Sep 21, 1999 (17:14). 1 line. What's "Surovell", and what does that have to do with anything? ---------- (113) #42 C. S. McGee (cmcgee) Tue, Sep 21, 1999 (21:28). 1 line. It's an ed ---------- (113) #43 David Cahill (dpc) Wed, Sep 22, 1999 (11:21). 1 line. Cute.