NearlyFreeSpeech.NET Blog https://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net A blog from the staff at NearlyFreeSpeech.NET. Sun, 27 Jul 2025 16:51:26 +0000 en-US hourly 1 A quick note to our queer members https://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2025/07/27/a-quick-note-to-our-queer-members/ https://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2025/07/27/a-quick-note-to-our-queer-members/#comments Sun, 27 Jul 2025 16:44:03 +0000 https://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/?p=821 We saw the recent news about Steam and Itch.io being forced to restrict legal adult content by Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal. As usual, plenty of creators guilty of existing while queer are getting caught in the crossfire.* We’ve also seen a bunch of recent signups from affected folks looking for a safe online place.

This is, to the best of our ability to create and maintain it, that place.

However, we highly value transparently. We’ve had our own issues with that type of pressure in the past. In addition to payment processing, our refusal to prohibit legal adult content makes it incredibly difficult for us to get certain types of insurance. (Like, more than one carrier has literally told us “we can’t write insurance for somebody falling and hurting themselves in your office because you won’t prohibit adult content on your servers.” Oh, fuck off!) We’ve been able to navigate that successfully thus far, but it’s a fine line. Steam and Itch also navigated it successfully, likely with the best of intentions, right up until they didn’t!

We cannot promise that we (and by extension, our members) won’t ever run into similar problems in the future. But we can promise that we will always fight. We can’t promise that we will win. But we can promise that if we fail, we died trying. (And even if we did somehow get forced into banning adult content, adult content != queer content!)

You. Are. Worth. Protecting.

Given this and all the other recent bullshit, we just wanted to make that clear to all of our queer and LGBT+ members… the brand new and the very, very old.

Also, the Fair Access to Banking Act (FABA) is currently in the US Senate and would prohibit banks and payment processors from putting this type of pressure on businesses engaged in legal activity. It was introduced and co-sponsored by 43 Republican Senators big mad about alleged bias against conservative businesses. If you’re in the US, please encourage your elected representatives to support it, if not because it would really help this sort of thing then because irony is an important part of a good, nutritious breakfast.

*I’m not sure that “crossfire” is the right term, given that the fanatics behind pushes like this are absolutely fine with it. Getting rid of adult content isn’t their goal, it’s their starting point.

]]>
https://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2025/07/27/a-quick-note-to-our-queer-members/feed/ 5
Terms & Conditions Update: Forced Assistance For Obstinance https://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2025/03/30/terms-conditions-update-forced-assistance-for-obstinance/ https://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2025/03/30/terms-conditions-update-forced-assistance-for-obstinance/#comments Sun, 30 Mar 2025 00:00:03 +0000 https://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/?p=813 Over the years, we have developed several policies that cover the rare situations when one of our members engages in problematic behavior. Rather than trying to maintain an exhaustive list of those situations and different ways of handling them, we have updated our Terms and Conditions of Service to merge those ad-hoc policies into a single new “Forced Assistance For Obstinance” policy.

What’s the situation?

This is a do-it-yourself service. We’ve got a lot of carefully-developed policies, procedures, and features to allow most people to handle most situations without our intervention. We also have ways of handling the exceptions, and those generally work very well.

But, unfortunately, the structure of our service does enable a critical failure state. It generally happens when a member is wrong about two things at once.

The first one could be nearly anything. What their username is. What email address they gave us when they signed up. How Unix filesystem permissions work. How their own domain name is spelled. How to transfer their membership to someone else. Whether or not they’re using a VPN. (Each of these is a recent actual example.)

Regardless of what the first thing might be, the second thing they are wrong about is always the same: they think that they need our help to deal with the first thing and that we won’t help them. And (this is important!) they are always wrong about that.

Although that’s a problem, it’s still a solvable problem. The critical failure requires a bit more. It requires that the person needs our help (even if only to tell them how to help themselves!), but they are actively doing something to prevent us from helping them.

We’ve probably seen all the ways that can happen by now. We’ve done our darnedest to put up signs pointing people in the right direction, and we’re always willing to further improve them. People will eventually be able to sort it out (with or without our help as needed), as long as they are willing to read and follow those signs.

The “Forced Assistance For Obstinance” policy covers what happens when they aren’t.

The Obstinance of Indifference

Sometimes there is a way for people to accomplish what they want, even if it doesn’t comport with our TACOS. Transferring a membership to another person is the classic example. When you change your contact email address, you’re asked if the new email address is the same person or a different person. If you say it’s a different person, you get a short page explaining how to transfer assets between people and why it’s important to do it that way.

Some people click the back arrow and change the answer to “same person” and submit the form again. There’s a process. There are really good reasons for the process. It’s not even difficult. They just don’t care. And sooner or later, they find out firsthand about the really good reasons in a way that causes problems that we have to deal with.

The Obstinance of Rage

Sometimes, the person can’t accomplish what they want. That’s understandably frustrating. And sometimes they don’t handle it… optimally. They fall into a three-step process:

1) Do not follow the advice they’ve been given.
2) The situation does not improve.
3) Return to step 1.

That persists, building up energy and anger with each repetition, until their stack overflows and they reach escape velocity, erupting forth in a sizzling ball of white-hot rage.

At that point, we’re no longer a service provider; we’re a villain. It is not sufficient to solve the original problem anymore. Now, it has to be solved in a way that triumphs over the villain. And that means forcing us to do what they want without following our (villainous!) policies. It’s a moral imperative!

NearlyFreeSpeech.NET does not negotiate with terrorists

Aside from blatantly violating our policies and leaving us to clean up the mess, there are various ways people attempt to force us to do various things.

I’m not going to give too many examples, because sharing an exhaustive list of ways to harass us seems like maybe not the best idea. But for the purposes of illustration, let’s take a PayPal dispute.

If a member of our service files a PayPal dispute over a payment they made, yes, we have to respond to that. We go dig up our records of the charge, the associated services provided, and our refund policy and provide that to PayPal. Our track record on such disputes isn’t perfect, but we win the vast majority of them because we charged what we said we would and provided the services we said we would, and the dispute was never really about the payment in the first place.

Does that force us to waste our time? Yes. Does it do anything to help the member with their problem? No. Though in some cases, they’ve worked themselves into such a tizzy that the idea that they’re punishing us is satisfaction enough. (However, perpetrating payment fraud as a method of inconveniencing others usually isn’t a great strategy. The backfire can be brutal.)

That’s pretty much the type of situation we’re dealing with. Whatever they wanted, there was another, better way to get it. But they elected the way of pain.

And it didn’t even work.

The “Forced Assistance For Obstinance” Policy

A “Forced Assistance For Obstinance” event occurs anytime we are forced to do something for or in response to a member that is outside the normal scope of the support that member is eligible for.

When that happens, a $50.00 fee will apply. That’s the same fee we’ve charged for years for dealing with a membership transfer that violates our TACOS and causes problems we have to deal with. Indeed, that’s an example of something that will now be covered by this policy. As will payment disputes.

In addition, if you’re a baseline member and the activity precipitating the event appears to be an attempt to obtain support consistent with what’s available to a subscription membership, we’ll convert your membership for you. (The cost of the switch will be deducted from the $50.00 fee.) We may also prevent you from downgrading the membership, either for a period of time or indefinitely in order to make sure that we’ll be able to assist you in the future if needed. If that’s unacceptable, you will always have the option to cancel. (Do note that people who’ve intentionally been making our lives difficult have historically greatly overestimated the dismay the prospect of their departure would elicit.)

Bottom Line

Look, we’ve all dealt with a company we are pretty sure was fucking with us just because they could. We’ve all dealt with stupid policies that appear intentionally designed to make it harder to get what we want. We’ve all dealt with companies that act like they resent customers for existing. (In fact, I’m pretty sure OptumRX checks all those boxes at once!)

This is not that company.

This is a small business. I am the owner. I have been personally involved every day for the past 23 years in trying to make the best service possible, and to do right by every one of my customers. Even the dickheads.

We want you to be successful. We are always here to help you. I am always here to help you. I see every support ticket. I personally have over 13,500 posts on our forum. I am not a hard person to reach.

The caveat is that help is not unconditional. If you want our help, it’s provided on our terms. Terms that keep our members’ data and assets safe, and keeps our service financially afloat.

We don’t provide email support. If you email us, you’re going to get an autoresponse. Do what it says. If the type of help you want is something (rare) that we charge for, pay for it. If we say you need to post on the forum to get help, post on the forum to get help. If we say you need to follow the process, follow the process.

And if you’ve been our loyal customer for 150 years and you can’t believe that you’re being treated so despicably, yeah, good instinct. Don’t believe it. You’re not being treated like that. There’s something specific you’re doing that’s keeping us from helping you.

Whatever you do, don’t spiral into a self-feeding rage demon until the main thing keeping you from solving your problem is being so angry that you can’t think straight and you lash out at people who really, genuinely would love to help you if you would let them. It’s really bad for your digestive system.

Also, it costs $50.00.

]]>
https://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2025/03/30/terms-conditions-update-forced-assistance-for-obstinance/feed/ 14
Automatic TLS is now a thing https://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2024/05/10/automatic-tls-is-now-a-thing/ https://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2024/05/10/automatic-tls-is-now-a-thing/#comments Fri, 10 May 2024 22:31:54 +0000 https://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/?p=806 We are rolling out new automatic TLS infrastructure that does not require members to set up or maintain anything. This means that, for new sites, aliases will get TLS automatically within a few minutes after they are set up and working. This works transparently with all site types, including custom processes and proxies. It doesn’t cost anything, you don’t have to do anything to set it up, and you don’t have to do anything to renew it.

Existing sites that we can detect to be using tls-setup.sh will be migrated to this setup over the next few weeks. That process is completely transparent, and our system attempts to disable the tls-setup.sh scheduled task once it is complete. Once that’s done, we’ll start adding automatic TLS to other existing sites. Our goal is to have TLS available on all aliases of all sites hosted here by the end of June. We will be monitoring the rollout and taking steps to improve the diagnostics and reporting.

This doesn’t affect the ability of sites to be accessed via HTTP, although we (continue to) strongly discourage that.

If this has been enabled for your site, you’ll see the ๐Ÿ” emoji next to aliases other than the permanent .nfshost.com alias in the Site Names & Aliases panel on your Site Information panel in the Member Interface.

Our special thanks to Let’s Encrypt, whose service provider integration makes this possible.

]]>
https://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2024/05/10/automatic-tls-is-now-a-thing/feed/ 8
Small Christmas upgrades https://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2023/12/26/small-christmas-upgrades/ https://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2023/12/26/small-christmas-upgrades/#comments Tue, 26 Dec 2023 02:31:36 +0000 https://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/?p=794 We’ve got a couple of small updates to announce today:

  • One server type to rule them all?
  • A forum facelift.

The Kitchen Sink: One server type to rule them all?

For quite some time, we have offered the “Apache 2.4, PHP, CGI” for PHP users and the “Apache 2.4 Generic” type for people who want to run Node.JS or other custom web server processes. It’s possible to run PHP under Apache 2.4 Generic as FastCGI, but it often requires you to rethink the structure of your application. That can be tricky if you didn’t write the application. There are workarounds but… they kinda suck. We’ve heard from several people in that position that they hate being in that position and wish they could just have both. Now, they can. We’ve added a server type called “The Kitchen Sink” that includes support for Apache, native PHP support, CGI, and custom daemons and proxies. This is great for people who need to run apps that are part PHP and part not, as well as for people with PHP apps who want to jam something like Memcached or Redis in there with it.

“The Kitchen Sink” is available on an experimental basis right now; from the Site Information panel, it’s enabled by editing your site’s service type. It may… or may not… get a different name when it leaves experimental status.

A forum facelift

As some of our longtime members may know, our member forum was originally based on phpBB 2. phpBB 2, however, reached end-of-life in 2009, so we’ve long since ditched most of the innards in favor of more modern, up-to-date code designed for PHP 8, not PHP 3. What we haven’t ditched, until now, is the now-brutally-outdated early-2000s-era aesthetic. We’ve made some behind-the-scenes fixes over the last couple of weeks designed to make the forum easier to understand and use. We’ve also finally put some effort into the design. That update went out today.

This is nothing groundbreaking; we tend to avoid “groundbreaking” when it comes to usability. But it’s a solid update from the early 2000s to at least the mid-2010s. This also isn’t the most important thing in the world but we wanted to close out the year with something a little bit fun but still beneficial. It’s been an absolutely wild year!

We hope the functional and design changes will make the forum easier to browse and read and more pleasant to interact with. I’ll still post there as my usual curmudgeonly self, though; apparently, no upgrade can fix that.

More information about the forum updates is available in the forum.

That’s all for now! More updates to come as soon as we’re finished tamping down the bugs flushed out by these!

]]>
https://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2023/12/26/small-christmas-upgrades/feed/ 5
Bigger, better, faster, more https://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2023/08/22/bigger-better-faster-more/ https://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2023/08/22/bigger-better-faster-more/#comments Tue, 22 Aug 2023 04:12:01 +0000 https://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/?p=773 I debated whether to write a humorous intro, but I’ve ultimately decided it’s more important to get succinct information out to everyone, so here’s the TLDR:
Over the next few weeks, we will migrate NearlyFreeSpeech.NET to all-new equipment and greatly upgraded network infrastructure.

  • We’re replacing our Intel Xeon servers with brand-new AMD Epyc servers.
  • All our existing file storage will be migrated from SATA SSDs to NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSDs.
  • Most of our content will be served from New York City rather than Phoenix after the upgrade.
  • Various things may be intermittently weird or slow for the next couple of weeks as we shift them around, but we’re working hard to minimize and avoid disruptions to hosted services.

NearlyFreeSpeech goes Team Red

There’s no question that Intel has been good to us. Xeons are great processors. But these days, AMD Epyc… wow. The processors aren’t cheap, but the compute performance and I/O bandwidth are outstanding. 128 PCIe 4.0 lanes? Per CPU? Except for the speedup, this change should be transparent to most people. By and large, we’ve tried to protect people from building things too specific to exact CPU models by masking certain features, but there is probably some random instruction set supported on the old machines that isn’t present on the new ones. So if you’ve done something super-weird, you may have to recompile.

I don’t want to make any specific promises about performance. After all the speculative branch execution fixes, the security layers needed for our system to protect you properly, and other overhead, these things never quite reach their maximum potential. But, so far, they’re so fast!

Here’s the catch. Some ancient site plans bill based on storage space but not CPU usage. These plans have been gone for about ten years. They were an incredibly bad deal for people who wanted to store lots of data, but it cost basically nothing if your site was tiny and used lots of CPU. That wasn’t sustainable for us. We grandfathered those sites at the time because we’ve always paid a flat rate for a fixed amount of electricity whether we use it or not, and those sites have been running on the same hardware ever since (Intel Xeon X5680s!). Neither of those things will be true going forward, so it’s the end of the road for those plans. We plan to temporarily allocate a bare minimum amount of hardware to those sites for a few months and then let affected people know that they’ll be migrated to current plans around the end of the year.

If you want to check this now:

  1. Go to the Site Information panel for your site.
  2. Find the “Billing Information” box.
  3. If there’s been a red-text message “($10.24/GB/Month – Legacy Billing!)” on the “Storage Class” line for the last ten years, you’re affected.

To change it, find the “Config Information” box and edit the Server Type. Pick the closest option. (If in doubt, “Apache 2.4, PHP, CGI.”)

Quoth the raven, “NVMe more!”

It’s something of a sore point that our file storage performance has always been a bit lackluster. That’s largely because of the tremendous overhead in ensuring your data is incredibly safe. Switching from SATA SSDs to NVMe will give a healthy boost in that area. The drives are much faster, and the electrical path between a site and its data will be shorter and faster. And it’ll give all those Epyc PCIe lanes something to do.

But there’s a little more to the story. To get adequate resiliency, sacrificing some performance is a necessary evil. It just flat-out takes longer to write to multiple SSDs in multiple physical servers and wait for confirmation than to YOLO your data into the write cache of a device plugged into the motherboard and hope for the best. We accept that. And we’ve always accepted that our less-than-stellar filesystem performance was the compromise we had to make to get the level of resiliency we wanted. However, we’ve always suspected we were giving up too much. It’s taken years, but we’ve finally confirmed that some weird firmware issues have created intermittent slowness above and beyond the necessary overhead.

So we expect our filesystem performance to be dramatically better after the upgrade. Don’t get me wrong; it won’t be a miracle. The fastest SAN in the world is still slower than the NVMe M.2 SSD on the average gaming PC (or cheap VPS). But one keeps multiple copies of your data live at all times and does streaming backups, and one doesn’t. And it should be a hell of a lot better than it has been.

Related to this, we’ve made some structural changes to site storage that will make moving them easier and faster. That has some other benefits we care a lot about that you probably don’t, like making storage accounting super fast. It should also make some other neat things possible. But we need to explore that a little more before we announce anything.

New York, New York!

Things have changed quite a bit since we started. As much as I love Phoenix, it’s not the Internet hub it was when I lived there in the 1990s. While some benefits remain, I no longer believe it’s the best place for our service. We see dumb stuff we can’t control, like Internet backbones routing traffic for the US east coast and Europe from Phoenix through Los Angeles because it’s cheaper. New York, on the other hand, is functionally the center of the Internet. (More specifically, the old Western Union building at 60 Hudson Street in Manhattan.)

It will surprise no one that Manhattan real estate is not exactly in our budget, but we got close. And, more importantly, we are parked directly on top of the fiber serving that building. It’d cost about ten times more to shave 0.1 milliseconds of our ping times.

This change will make life demonstrably better for most people visiting hosted sites; they’re in the eastern US and Europe. But we’re not leaving the west hanging out to dry. We can finally do what I always wanted: deploy our own CDN. After we’re finished, traffic for customer sites will be able to hit local servers in Phoenix, New York, and Boston. Those servers will transparently call back to the core for interactive stuff but can serve static content directly, much like our front-end servers do today. That’s already tested and working. You might be using it right now.

The new design is completely flexible. It doesn’t matter where your site is located; traffic enters our network at the closest point to the requestor, and then our system does the right thing to handle it with maximum efficiency.

It’s now technically possible for us to run your site’s PHP in New York, store your files in Boston, and have your MySQL database in Phoenix. But “could” doesn’t always mean “should.” We’re still constrained by the speed of light; a two-thousand-mile round trip on every database query would suck pretty hard. (But I’ve done it myself with the staging version of the member site. It works!) So everything’s going to New York for now.

Keeping it weird

This change means we have to move all your data across the country. Sometime in the next few weeks, each site and MySQL process will be briefly placed in maintenance and migrated across our network from Phoenix to New York. For most sites, this should take less than a minute. We’ll start with static sites because they don’t have any external dependencies. Then we’ll move each member’s stuff all at once so we don’t put your MySQL processes and site software into a long-distance relationship for more than a few minutes. Once we have a specific schedule, we’ll attempt to make some information and, hopefully, some control available via the member UI to help you further minimize disruption. But our goal is that most people won’t even notice.
There may be some other weirdness during this period, like slowness on the ssh server, and you may actually have to start paying attention to what ssh hostname to use. All that will be sorted out by the time we’re done.

Some longtime members may recall the 2007 move where it took us over a day to move our service a few miles across town. At the time, we wrote, “Should we ever need to move facilities in the future, no matter how long it takes or how much it costs, we will just build out the new facility in its entirety, move all the services between the two live facilities, and then burn down the old one for the insurance money.” Oh my god, it took a long time and cost so much money, but that’s exactly what’s happening. (Sans burning down the facility! We love our Phoenix facility and hope to continue to have equipment there as long as Arizona remains capable of sustaining human life.)

Final thoughts

These changes represent an enormous investment. Thus, much like everyone else these past couple of years, we will have to pass along a huge price increase.

No, just kidding.

Our prices will stay exactly the same, at least for now. (Except for domain registration, where constant pricing fuckery at the registries and registrar remain the status quo. Sadly, there’s nothing we can do about that. Yet.) In fact, they might go down. We bill based on how much CPU time you use, and it’s likely to take less time to do the same amount of work on the new hardware.

The last few years have been pretty weird. COVID aside, NearlyFreeSpeech.NET has been keeping pretty quiet. There’s a reason for that. I’m proud of what NearlyFreeSpeech.NET is. But there’s a gap between what is and what I think should be. There always has been. And that gap is probably bigger than you think.

So I spent some time… OK, nearly three years… more or less preserving the status quo while I did a very deep dive to learn some things I felt I needed to know. And then, I spent a year paying off tech debt, like getting our UI code cleaned up and onto PHP 8 and setting up this move. So four years went by awfully fast with little visible change, all in pursuit of a long-term plan. And in a few weeks, we’ll be finished. With the foundation.

“It’s a bold strategy, Cotton. Let’s see if it pays off for ’em!”

]]>
https://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2023/08/22/bigger-better-faster-more/feed/ 19
Hey! What happened to 2023Q2? https://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2023/07/28/hey-what-happened-to-2023q2/ https://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2023/07/28/hey-what-happened-to-2023q2/#comments Fri, 28 Jul 2023 21:01:25 +0000 https://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/?p=767 You may have noticed that production sites with normal updates are being upgraded from 2022Q4 to 2023Q1, and non-production sites are being upgraded from 2023Q1 to 2023Q3. So what happened to 2023Q2?

Wrangling the amount of pre-built software we do is a constant challenge. Something is always changing. And changes frequently break stuff. Several things changed around the same time earlier this year, especially some stuff related to Python, the FreeBSD ports-building process, and other more niche languages that our members care about, like Haskell and Octave. Some of those had nasty interactions. We also have some other changes in the works that have impacted this. (It will be an Epyc change. More details coming soon!)

To make a long story short, we spent so long on the 2023Q2 quarterly software build that it was July, and we still had problems. We finally have a clean build that passes all of our hundreds of internal tests. But we also have the 2023Q3 quarterly build running just as smoothly. Since 2023Q2 won’t get any security updates through the FreeBSD ports team, having our non-production members test it doesn’t seem useful. And we’re sure not going to roll it out to production sites untested.

And so, we are skipping it. The default realm for production sites will be the (now very thoroughly tested) 2023Q1 realm. And the default realm for non-production sites will be the shiny new 2023Q3 realm. As always, we’ll backport security fixes as needed from 2023Q3 to 2023Q1.

No more PHP 7!

For those sites being upgraded from 2022Q4 to 2023Q1, it’s worth reiterating that PHP 7.4 was deprecated in 2021, and security support ended in November 2022. If your site still runs on PHP 7 eight months later, you’re in for a bad time. The PHP developers are ardent adherents of “move fast & break things,” and backward compatibility is the thing they break the most. Back in February, we posted information about this, including some advice for updating, in our forums.

]]>
https://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2023/07/28/hey-what-happened-to-2023q2/feed/ 4
NearlyFreeSpeech.NET turns 20 today https://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2022/01/18/nearlyfreespeech-net-turns-20-today/ https://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2022/01/18/nearlyfreespeech-net-turns-20-today/#comments Tue, 18 Jan 2022 17:05:07 +0000 https://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/?p=755 The NearlyFreeSpeech.NET domain was registered on January 18, 2002. We’re 20 years old today. Wow! So much has changed between then and now. And so much hasn’t.

Looking forward to the next 20!

]]>
https://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2022/01/18/nearlyfreespeech-net-turns-20-today/feed/ 17
Free Speech in 2021 https://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2021/01/19/free-speech-in-2021/ Tue, 19 Jan 2021 19:35:28 +0000 https://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/?p=743 So, a bunch of people suddenly discovered they care deeply about free speech immediately after a handful of racists faced even mild consequences for plotting a literal insurrection.

That does not reflect well on those people.

We’ve received quite a few emails (and signups) from them in the past week or so. They appear to believe that “free speech” means they can say whatever they want without repercussions. (It does not.) They expect us to agree with them about that. (We do not.) And they believe they’re entitled to our reassurance and, in some cases, assistance. (They are not.)

We have zero time and even less energy to waste on such nonsense. It is also difficult to express the full magnitude of our disinterest in passing some Internet Randolorian’s “free speech” litmus test. So we close all such inquiries without responding.

But I do want to make some things crystal clear.

First, we’ve been in the free speech business for nearly 20 years. We are experts at this. (We are capable of seeing through even sophisticated arguments like: “I said it. Therefore, it’s speech. Free speech is speech. Therefore what I said is free speech!”) So if getting your content online depends on your web host misunderstanding what free speech is, please save yourself some time; we’re not the right service for you.

Second, yes, hosting illegal content on our system will get you kicked off. You won’t get a refund. But it does not end there. There’s a school of thought that we can’t possibly be a “real” free speech host if we ever cooperate with the authorities. We didn’t go to that school. If you abuse our service to break the law, we will not only cooperate, we will turn you in ourselves.

When we cooperate with law enforcement, we do not do so blindly. We review their activities, both for abuse of power and to make sure proper processes are followed to protect our members’ rights. Such things are vanishingly rare, not (as they are sometimes depicted) the default. So if you’re expecting that we will automatically say, “Shove it, coppah!” anytime the police come calling about your site, we’re not the right service for you.

Finally, if you’re a racist, we’re not on your side. We are not your allies. We are not sympathizers. The “Free Speech” in our company name is not a secret dog whistle to you. We believe that America accomplished what it has despite the hatred and bigotry that has always plagued us, not because of it. We believe diversity is America’s spicy secret sauce, which we love. And we have no interest in living in a sea of mayonnaise. We do not want you to host your garbage here. We will not lift one finger to help you do that. We will kick you off the instant you give us a reason. We’re not the right service for you.

]]>
Maintenance for Christmas https://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2019/12/24/maintenance-for-christmas/ https://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2019/12/24/maintenance-for-christmas/#comments Tue, 24 Dec 2019 18:11:25 +0000 https://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/?p=737 Christmas Eve and Christmas Day are the lowest-usage days of the year (both in terms of member activity and in terms of visits to member sites), so we are going to roll out some core system upgrades over the next 36 hours. These updates relate mostly to file servers.

Despite having no single point of failure from the hardware perspective, each site’s content is still backed by a single system image (necessary for coherency), so these updates may cause some temporary disruptions to affected sites. We will do our best to minimize that.

We do also plan to upgrade our core database servers. These are fully redundant, so we do not anticipate disruption, but the possibility does exist. We hope this upgrade will resolve an issue that mainly manifests as intermittent errors in our member interface early in the morning (UTC) on Sundays.

]]>
https://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2019/12/24/maintenance-for-christmas/feed/ 1
Act now: The latest effort to censor you (FOSTA) is here! https://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2018/02/28/act-now-the-latest-effort-to-censor-you-fosta-is-here/ https://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2018/02/28/act-now-the-latest-effort-to-censor-you-fosta-is-here/#comments Wed, 28 Feb 2018 21:09:18 +0000 https://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/?p=733 The US House of Representatives has just passed a bill called FOSTA (the “Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act”). This bill is headed to the senate. It needs to be stopped.

This bill is, as the name implies, ostensibly intended to fight sex trafficking. Sex trafficking is awful, and should be fought. But a lot of sex trafficking experts think that this bill won’t have that effect. That it will actually make things much worse for sex workers. For example, those sex trafficking victims that are supposed to be protected may suddenly find it illegal to talk about their experiences. Whoops.

(Yes, that’s a Jezebel link. If they don’t match your politics, fair enough, try Reason. Pretty much nobody on any side thinks this is a good idea, except a handful of underinformed celebrities. This is not a right-left issue.)

That’s probably reason enough not to pass it, or at least to go back and take another look. But that’s not the end of the story.

An amendment slipped into the bill also proposes to override section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Without overstating the case in any way, CDA 230 is the reason small companies like ours can exist. It protects us from liability for the actions and content of our customers. That means if you don’t like what one of our customers has to say, you can’t sue us about it. The First Amendment is great, and we love it, but in everyday practice, CDA 230 is what keeps rich people and companies from filing nuisance lawsuits to force us to either censor our customers at their behest or drown in legal fees. They know that, and they hate it.

As the EFF has pointed out, if this protection is weakened, pretty soon the small voices will be silenced. Not because what they have to say is illegal, but simply because it might be. Fear of liability will force providers like us to either moderate all the content that appears on our service — massively Orwellian and expensive — or simply proactively disallow anything that might possibly create liability. Or just shut down and leave the Internet to the likes of Facebook.

In that climate, the only people who will be able to have websites will be people who can afford teams of lawyers and people who only say things so boring that they don’t run any risk of creating liability. Remember when mass communication consisted of three broadcast TV channels and everything said on them had to be approved by the channel’s “Standards & Practices” department, which censored much more than any law required them to because that was cheaper than fighting? Do you miss those days?

If you’re not that worried about us, that’s fine. Here’s why you should still care. Does your website have a forum? Does your blog allow comments? Do you have a feedback form? A wiki? Could someone post spam anywhere on your site offering sex for money? If so, enjoy your ten years in Federal prison. (And yes, we’ve seen several cases where people engaging in illegal activity find unmonitored corners of sites that allow user-contributed content and use them to communicate. We act to shut that down when we find out about it, but we’re strongly against sending the operators of those sites — or us — to prison for “facilitating” those communications.)

This sort of crackdown on online communication has been attempted several times in the past, usually around intellectual property. (Remember SOPA, PIPA, etc.?) But intellectual property owners, despite being good lobbyists, aren’t very sympathetic public figures. Sex trafficking victims are.

That is definitely reason enough not to pass it. But that’s still not the end of the story.

If you live in the United States and you ever took even a high-school level civics class, you probably ran across the concept of an ex post facto law. This refers to a situation where, if I’m in government and you do something legal that I don’t like, I make a law against it, I make that law retroactive, and then I use it to prosecute you for what you already did. That’s not how law works, and it’s not allowed.

But FOSTA contains this little tidbit:

(b) EFFECTIVE DATE.โ€”The amendments made by this section shall take effect on the date of the enactment of this Act, and the amendment made by subsection (a) shall apply regardless of whether the conduct alleged occurred, or is alleged to have occurred, before, on, or after such date of enactment.

Whoops. I guess Mrs. Mimi Walters of California (the author of the text above) skipped civics class. To be fair to Mrs. Walters, the US Constitution is very vague on this point, and the language is convoluted and hard to follow. (“No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.” – Article 1, Section 9)

That’s not the only problem, nor is it only my opinion. The US Department of Justice agrees, raising “serious constitutional concern” about the ex post facto nature of the law and states that the is broader than necessary (meaning it criminalizes not only more than it needs to, but also more than the authors think it does). They are also concerned that despite making so much stuff illegal, this bill makes it harder to prosecute the actual sex traffickers.

When the Department of Justice tells you you’re making too much stuff illegal, obviously you take a step back and fix things… unless you’re the US House of Representatives.
In that case, you pass it as-is 388-25.

That’s right, the US House passed a bill that, our own liability concerns aside, makes it harder to prosecute sex traffickers, but criminalizes people speaking out against sex trafficking, including former victims. What the hell? Do sex traffickers suddenly have really good lobbyists?

The bill has now moved on to the US Senate. Internet superhero Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon is doing his best to save us all once again, as he has done so many times before. But he needs our help. If you’re in the US, please call or email your senators today and urge them to send FOSTA back to the drawing board in favor of something Constitutional, limited, and effective. FOSTA is none of those things.

]]>
https://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2018/02/28/act-now-the-latest-effort-to-censor-you-fosta-is-here/feed/ 14