March Riseup Newsletter: Stop AOL Email Tax, Yahoo is evil and Support Riseup.net

==> Stop AOL Email Tax <==

AOL is adopting a system called CertifiedEmail, which is a threat to a free and open Internet.

The list that you have with Riseup likely has a number of AOL email addresses subscribed to it. Please consider encouraging your group to sign-on to this broad coalition that is fighting this. It is clear that if the AOL email tax is not fought, AOL will make it incredibly difficult to deliver your list email to your subscribers.

We know that your list is critical for your organizing efforts, but AOL is trying to reduce the effectiveness of your work by creating a system where reliable email only is provided to those who can afford to pay for every email sent. Their system is harmful to free speech, and it is designed to extort money from senders in exchange for privileged service. AOL wants us to pay an email tax to get guaranteed delivery, and if we don't pay, then delivery to AOL addresses will increasingly be undelivered.

By creating one class of Internet users who pay for guaranteed email delivery, AOL will leave everyone else (thats us) as a second-class citizen on the Internet. AOL's email tax creates an unlevel playing field online and as a result your online organizing will suffer unless we stop it together. Those who can afford to pay for preferential service will leave behind those of us who cannot, resulting in unreliable email delivery.

Please help us save the free and open Internet by growing our coalition. Please reach out to organizations you are a part of. We can't afford this, nor can you, please encourage your group to sign-on to this broad coalition:
http://www.dearaol.com/joinorg.html

Individuals can sign-on here:
http://www.dearaol.com

Thanks for your help on this important cause.
P.S. Please be sure to sign!


==> Yahoo is evil <==

In addition to being boring capitalists, yahoo.com is in the practice of helping to jail Chinese reporters and dissidents. On December 2003, Chinese dissident Li Zhi was sentenced to 8 years imprisonment for inciting "subversion" using evidence provided by yahoo. On April 2005, Shi Tao (a journalist working for a Chinese newspaper) was sentenced to 10 years in prison for leaking details of a censorship order, again using evidence provided by yahoo.

This horror is not isolated to yahoo: gmail, hotmail, and aol all make it standard practice to turn over requested documents without even attempting to contest the request. The much reported refusal by google to turn over historical search statistics to the US government misses the fact that they already allow the government to scan all gmail
traffic (as do yahoo, hotmail and aol).

We encourage you to stop using yahoo and the other services it owns (flickr, del.icio.us, and geocities, to name a few).


==> We need your support <==

The people behind riseup.net consist of about ten active collective members and volunteers at any given time. Unfortunately, we work on riseup.net in the small bits of free time we have available: after school or work, on the weekends, late at night. This is not enough! Currently, our workload is enough for at least ten full time workers. We do have two people who work full time on riseup.net, and receive a small stipend of $300 per month, which is not enough to survive.

We have a dream that some day the community support for riseup.net will match the time and resources it takes to keep riseup.net running. If you have put in a help ticket recently, we apologize for the delay: we receive about five hundred questions a month, and are currently working hard to catch up.

Most people are familiar with our email and mailing list services, but we have many other exciting projects going on behind the scenes, including: a tech collective incubation project, a community colocation project, free software development, and a suite of security and privacy patches.

If you believe, as we do, that liberatory social movements must have control over their own means of communication, then we invite you to run to our donation page at http://riseup.net/donate. If you live in the Global South, we ask that you do not donate to riseup.net but keep local whatever resources you have.

in solidarity,
the riseup collective