Irving Anellis asks:
REPLY:
Thanks very much for your offer, Irving. I should be finding out today whether or not the change in management at my local ISP, The Door, to a nationally based ISP called "Windstream", will involve a reinstatement of a hosting commitment there, and if so at what expense. The Door was doing it pro bono, the new company probably not. Since ARISBE is not a huge site, compared to some -- it uses a little less than 70 megabytes of space, which is not much anymore -- the monthly fee will probably be pretty small, small enough at least to stay with them for a little longer even at my own expense, if necessary. But the real need is to establish both ARISBE and PEIRCE-L on the same server and to integrate them as effectively as possible. Just how this is to be done is not at all clear to me, simply as a question of efficieny of function, But on the technical side, it will also entail getting a first-rate listserver program, such as the one that used to be called "listserv", for example -- I forget the current name for it -- that has an archival system which is more usable than any others I am acquainted with, which requires quite a bit more money for the deluxe version. But that is what is needed as far as the list server goes. (Although it is questionable whether I can actually retrieve all of the old messages -- going back to August 1993 -- from the computing people at Texas Tech, who have changed the server system several times over the years and never yet lived up to their obligation to port the archives from server to server when they did so, I have copies myself of nearly everything from the beginning, perhaps with an occasional loss of a few messages at certain times but with no big gaps; but the conversion of them into a common format will be a time consuming task since ti cannot be fully automated. But it can be done and should be done.) The upshot of all this is that what is really wanted is a new home, as permanent as possible, for both ARISBE and the list, a functional integration of them, and a reconstituting of the archives for the list from its beginnings some thirteen years ago up to the present..
Okay, one problem this poses is that it seems clear that to do this right is going to require making the combined server system self-sustaining financially, and that raises the question of how, since I take it for granted that neither the ARISBE website nor the PEIRCE-L list should have any registration fee or any other impediment to universal access and use. My non-expert impression is that although there is not much problem with the maintenance of a server for a website like ARISBE as it presently stands, the same cannot be said for a list server owing, first, to the many technical complications which email systems introduce under the best of conditions, and second, to the fact that the onslaught of spammers, invasive and malicious hackers, and the like is both constant and is constantly changing as regards the kind of invasive and destructive strategies being used and likely to continue at the same or even greater pace into the indefinite future as spies and saboteurs of every type -- governmental, commercial, religious fanatics, and miscellaneous indiividual nihilists, cranks, and adventurers -- continue to figure out new ways to eavesdrop and sometimes simply disrupt communication of every sort.
In short, it is my impression that it is probably unwise for well-intentioned individuals such as yourself, with small business or non-commercial organizations or projects, to take on the responsibility for maintaining list servers in particular, since they are a constant headache and are not likely to be any less so for the foreseeable future.
This then raises the question of what sort of institutions should be turned to for hosting these things, and of course one immediately thinks of universities as the natural home for such entities. However, the problem with that is that universities are, as a general rule, no less unscrupulous in respect to any matters that they regard as part of their proper concern than commercial organizations or governments (and of course they sometimes are just a part of a governmental system). There are no doubt exceptions to this, but this has little to do with their prestige as universities and if you do not know the inner workings of the given university you cannot know which are and which are not scrupulous in the way you want them to be. Far from it being the case that you can turn to universities for protection; you must on the contrary be especially alert to unwanted activities on their part now because of the privatization movement, which has reduced most of them to little more than commercial enterprises, ruled by the financial profit motive in every aspect of their operation. Now, every form of communication can be construed as publication, legally regarded, including our forum discussions, and so also for every item that goes up on an archive system, and the universities are constantly reconsidering what they can and cannot get away with treating as their own intellectual property to do with as they please, depending upon whether they think any such property has any possible monetary value. Then, too, there is the constantly growing monitoring of all communicational activities for purposes of "natural security". so that the distinction between what is governmental and what is not is increasingly an illusion, in any case. In sum, on this point, then, it is not at all clear that it is prudent to turn to a university institution as a host since the apparent protection there is usually quite unreal, and there is very little way of knowing which, if any, of them actually practices what it nominally preaches about the protecion of freedom of speech. I should add, too, that what tends to make universities particularly untrustworthy is that they are among the most highly protected of all institutions from lawsuits. If you want to commit a major crime a university campus is a good site for the purpose since judges are loathe to try to penetrate through the thickets of obscurantist legalisms that university lawyers have at their disposal for eliminating unwanted probes of the way they run their business.
What this seems to me to point to is the need to establish the website and the list at some legally independent place by establishing a non-profit organization that contracts with some reasonably reliable commercial IT service to provide the daily maintenance and the routine technical upgrading that is required to keep abreast of the changes and take advantages of the opportunities which the continuing development's in communications technology offer.. That is something that requies a financial solution as well as a technical and functional one. For this reason it seems best to buy a little time right now to prepare for making such a major move by staying temporarily with the people who are taking over the hosting for The Door, if they will continue to host ARISBE and maintain address continuity so that when people go to the old address they will automatically be redirected (by aliasing or whatever). As I said, I should be able to find out about that today.
So thanks again, for your offer, Irving, and thanks also to another liist member who contacted me off-list with a similar offer to host ARISBE, as least temporarily. I am sure that there are still others who can be counted upon to be similarly generous in helping to sustain the basis on-line for our discussions here and for Peirce studies generally.
Joe Ransdell manager of PEIRCE-L and the website ARISBE
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Is there a possibility of setting up a dedicated server for Arisbe at your university, at the Peirce Edition Project offices in Indy, or some similar venue such as the Peirce Project at U Montreal or some other university?
If I can figure out the technicalities of how we might incorporate it into the Peirce Publishing web site at http://www.peircepublishing.com, I'd be willing to give it free space as a public service to our community.REPLY:
Thanks very much for your offer, Irving. I should be finding out today whether or not the change in management at my local ISP, The Door, to a nationally based ISP called "Windstream", will involve a reinstatement of a hosting commitment there, and if so at what expense. The Door was doing it pro bono, the new company probably not. Since ARISBE is not a huge site, compared to some -- it uses a little less than 70 megabytes of space, which is not much anymore -- the monthly fee will probably be pretty small, small enough at least to stay with them for a little longer even at my own expense, if necessary. But the real need is to establish both ARISBE and PEIRCE-L on the same server and to integrate them as effectively as possible. Just how this is to be done is not at all clear to me, simply as a question of efficieny of function, But on the technical side, it will also entail getting a first-rate listserver program, such as the one that used to be called "listserv", for example -- I forget the current name for it -- that has an archival system which is more usable than any others I am acquainted with, which requires quite a bit more money for the deluxe version. But that is what is needed as far as the list server goes. (Although it is questionable whether I can actually retrieve all of the old messages -- going back to August 1993 -- from the computing people at Texas Tech, who have changed the server system several times over the years and never yet lived up to their obligation to port the archives from server to server when they did so, I have copies myself of nearly everything from the beginning, perhaps with an occasional loss of a few messages at certain times but with no big gaps; but the conversion of them into a common format will be a time consuming task since ti cannot be fully automated. But it can be done and should be done.) The upshot of all this is that what is really wanted is a new home, as permanent as possible, for both ARISBE and the list, a functional integration of them, and a reconstituting of the archives for the list from its beginnings some thirteen years ago up to the present..
Okay, one problem this poses is that it seems clear that to do this right is going to require making the combined server system self-sustaining financially, and that raises the question of how, since I take it for granted that neither the ARISBE website nor the PEIRCE-L list should have any registration fee or any other impediment to universal access and use. My non-expert impression is that although there is not much problem with the maintenance of a server for a website like ARISBE as it presently stands, the same cannot be said for a list server owing, first, to the many technical complications which email systems introduce under the best of conditions, and second, to the fact that the onslaught of spammers, invasive and malicious hackers, and the like is both constant and is constantly changing as regards the kind of invasive and destructive strategies being used and likely to continue at the same or even greater pace into the indefinite future as spies and saboteurs of every type -- governmental, commercial, religious fanatics, and miscellaneous indiividual nihilists, cranks, and adventurers -- continue to figure out new ways to eavesdrop and sometimes simply disrupt communication of every sort.
In short, it is my impression that it is probably unwise for well-intentioned individuals such as yourself, with small business or non-commercial organizations or projects, to take on the responsibility for maintaining list servers in particular, since they are a constant headache and are not likely to be any less so for the foreseeable future.
This then raises the question of what sort of institutions should be turned to for hosting these things, and of course one immediately thinks of universities as the natural home for such entities. However, the problem with that is that universities are, as a general rule, no less unscrupulous in respect to any matters that they regard as part of their proper concern than commercial organizations or governments (and of course they sometimes are just a part of a governmental system). There are no doubt exceptions to this, but this has little to do with their prestige as universities and if you do not know the inner workings of the given university you cannot know which are and which are not scrupulous in the way you want them to be. Far from it being the case that you can turn to universities for protection; you must on the contrary be especially alert to unwanted activities on their part now because of the privatization movement, which has reduced most of them to little more than commercial enterprises, ruled by the financial profit motive in every aspect of their operation. Now, every form of communication can be construed as publication, legally regarded, including our forum discussions, and so also for every item that goes up on an archive system, and the universities are constantly reconsidering what they can and cannot get away with treating as their own intellectual property to do with as they please, depending upon whether they think any such property has any possible monetary value. Then, too, there is the constantly growing monitoring of all communicational activities for purposes of "natural security". so that the distinction between what is governmental and what is not is increasingly an illusion, in any case. In sum, on this point, then, it is not at all clear that it is prudent to turn to a university institution as a host since the apparent protection there is usually quite unreal, and there is very little way of knowing which, if any, of them actually practices what it nominally preaches about the protecion of freedom of speech. I should add, too, that what tends to make universities particularly untrustworthy is that they are among the most highly protected of all institutions from lawsuits. If you want to commit a major crime a university campus is a good site for the purpose since judges are loathe to try to penetrate through the thickets of obscurantist legalisms that university lawyers have at their disposal for eliminating unwanted probes of the way they run their business.
What this seems to me to point to is the need to establish the website and the list at some legally independent place by establishing a non-profit organization that contracts with some reasonably reliable commercial IT service to provide the daily maintenance and the routine technical upgrading that is required to keep abreast of the changes and take advantages of the opportunities which the continuing development's in communications technology offer.. That is something that requies a financial solution as well as a technical and functional one. For this reason it seems best to buy a little time right now to prepare for making such a major move by staying temporarily with the people who are taking over the hosting for The Door, if they will continue to host ARISBE and maintain address continuity so that when people go to the old address they will automatically be redirected (by aliasing or whatever). As I said, I should be able to find out about that today.
So thanks again, for your offer, Irving, and thanks also to another liist member who contacted me off-list with a similar offer to host ARISBE, as least temporarily. I am sure that there are still others who can be counted upon to be similarly generous in helping to sustain the basis on-line for our discussions here and for Peirce studies generally.
Joe Ransdell manager of PEIRCE-L and the website ARISBE
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
----- Original Message ----
From: "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Peirce Discussion Forum <peirce-l@lyris.ttu.edu>
Cc: Peirce Discussion Forum <peirce-l@lyris.ttu.edu>; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Tuesday, October 3, 2006 8:33:40 AM
Subject: [peirce-l]Re: [peirce-l] Arisbe archives availability
Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber [EMAIL PROTECTED]
From: "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Peirce Discussion Forum <peirce-l@lyris.ttu.edu>
Cc: Peirce Discussion Forum <peirce-l@lyris.ttu.edu>; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Tuesday, October 3, 2006 8:33:40 AM
Subject: [peirce-l]Re: [peirce-l] Arisbe archives availability
Jamie, Joe,
Is there a possibility of setting up a dedicated server for Arisbe at your university, at the Peirce Edition Project offices in Indy, or some similar venue such as the Peirce Project at U Montreal or some other university?
If I can figure out the technicalities of how we might incorporate it into the Peirce Publishing web site at http://www.peircepublishing.com, I'd be willing to give it free space as a public service to our community.
Irving
Irving Anellis
[EMAIL PROTECTED] or [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.peircepublishing.com
On Tue Oct 3 4:44 , Jaime Nubiola <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> sent:
---Dear colleagues,
While Arisbe is down, it is possible the get access to how was Arisbe in March 2005 and earlier, through the Internet Archive WayBackMachine (http://www.archive.org/index.php).
Best,
Jaime
Denis and list:
The ARISBE website is temporarily down, with a possibility that it might be permanently down at its present location and have to be reopened elsewhere. The Door -- the IPS that has been hosting it gratis -- was apparently taken over by a national networking company and it may not be possible -- or desirable if it is possible -- to keep it going there. I am waiting to hear back from somebody at The Door on this, and will let everybody know on this as soon as I find out something.
Two things important to understand: first, I have several complete up-to-date copies of the website stored on several different media and restoration is just a matter of pushing a few buttons once suitable arrangements are made, which I will do as quickly as possible if it is necessary to move it in order to restore it. I don't want to make more than one such move, though, because of the complications and possible confusions implicit in such a move.
Second, the PEIRCE-L forum is not systemically connected with the ARISBE website and whatever happens there has no effect on the workings of the listserver which provides the physical basis of this forum.
Joe Ransdell -- manager of PEIRCE-L and of the website ARISBE
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
