| Zenon Panoussis on 19 Apr 2001 07:05:37 -0000 |
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| [Nettime-nl] DDS developments |
There is a new website out there: http://dds.provocation.net . All it contains is your web pages. The index page says this: DDS has been a sinking ship for a long time, and the end seems to be getting closer. In a last effort to save it, the Vereniging Open Domein was founded and started negotiating with Joost Flint. Unfortunately, not much seems to come out of those - by now secret - negotiations, and time is running out. One thing is very clear though: Joost Flint and Chris G�bel smell money in the users that their BV got for free from the earlier DDS, so they are not going to let go easily. Thus, no meaningful negotiations can take place unless those users lose their commercial value. Luckily, the latter is a rather simple process, the beginning of which you are now looking at. As a first step, I have mirrored most of the 900+ currently public user home pages in the state they were in on April 16, 2001 (Flint says there are another 12.000 pages "somewhere", but if they're not public they're not at all. The same goes for Flint's claims about the total number of registered users). Anyway, if you are a DDS user and you are asked for money in order to keep your website, don't bother paying; your website is staying up anyway, for free. Within a few days you will also have FTP access to it so that you can keep updating it (or can delete it if you object to the mirror). Step two will be to offer all current DDS users new e-mail addresses on a final domain (provocation.net is just an interim solution). Since the DDS user database mysteriously escaped from its cage, this is just a matter of configuring a server and getting some more bandwidth. The progress will be announced here. Step three will take more time; it entails building a new front to the aforementioned and making a good-looking and well-functioning service out of it. The classical DDS design is probably Flint's copyright by now, so probably it can't be used. A new design takes time and so does the writing and testing of all the scripts that are needed for a smooth service. By the way, if you own stock in Scarlet, you might start thinking about selling it right now. Scarlet is buying DDS from Flint, which says a lot about Scarlet's risk assessment policies - or absence thereof. On the other hand, Scarlet stock could give you the kicks that Russian roulette can't give you any more. You might actually want to buy instead. Your choice, your fun. Ambitious plans, huh? Perhaps not. I operate alone, of my own initiative and with small means. I am not hampered by bureaucracy, weird agreements with Flint or bickering members, but can put my efforts into something productive. It might turn out that this is the best way to get something done. If not, nothing will have been lost except some of my time. In any case, wish me luck. You should visit http://dds.provocation.net and follow the links there; they are much more informative than this mail. ExecSum: Your website [whatever].dds.nl/~user can now be found as well at http://dds.provocation.net/~user . This is a free service. You don't need to do anything to maintain it. This website is completely independent of your site at DDS. If you would rather have your website removed from this mirror, just mail [email protected] **from your @dds account** and ask me to remove it. Before doing so I will ask you to reply to a mail, just to make sure that nobody is asking me to delete somebody else's website. In the beginning of next week you will have FTP access to your website and you will be able to modify it yourself. You should not announce your new website publicly yet, nor start indexing it with search engines. dds.provocation.net is only a temporary home. The pages will be moved to a shorter (and less glamorous :) .nl domain sometime next week. When that has been done, you can, if you want, submit your site to search engines and put redirects on your dds pages. * Also, as you probably have noticed, you have been subscribed to a mailing list (listserver courtesy of Karin Spaink). Subscribers to the list are for now the DDS users whose pages have been mirrored, some people at opendomein and - obviously - Joost Flint. Subscribing you to a mailing list without asking is very close to bad netiquette, but sending out several hundreds of BCCs is not any better. Somehow I need to inform you about this before you read about it in the press. If you want off the list, just send a mail to [email protected] with unsubscribe dds [email protected] in the body of the message. I.e. something like this: === From: [email protected] To: [email protected] Subject: whatever unsubscribe dds [email protected] === I sincerly hope that we will all enjoy the developments on the subject, on this list. If you would like to contribute in any way to the future free and Flint-BV-free DDS, mail me privately. And do join opendomein.nl . I have made a lot of nasty remarks about opendomein so far, but at least they embrace all the old DDS priniples. With a few kicks from the membership they could turn into an organisation that is both idealistic and commercially efficient at the same time, as JF would say :) Z -- oracle@everywhere: The ephemeral source of the eternal truth... ______________________________________________________ * Verspreid via nettime-nl. 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