immerda:Newsletter:201109:en

Hi,

We finally decided to address our small "community" with some updates. We are constantly busy working on our services, supporting and - of course - developing new stuff. For you and with you. Nevertheless this work is not always visible. We'd like to make you aware of some current problems, of new services, of our need for feedback and help, and of some political issues, that will come up.

Our plan is to release newsletters on a regular basis from now on.

have fun reading

cheers,

immerda admin team

Agenda

The Swiss Privacy Foundation organizes workshops on digital self defense. This fall they'll be three times in Berne at the Infoshop in the Reitschule. And we will support those events too. If you'd like to attend then sign up for the workshops directly at the SPF.

Workshpos happen at 19 o'clock on Wednesday:

Mi. 28.09.2011 - Encrypt E-Mails with GPG
Mi. 12.10.2011 - Surf without a trace
Mi. 26.10.2011 - Surf anonymously with tor

Finances

You probably know already that all people work for free at immerda. We can pay our bills from the donations we get from you. We feel to owe you a thank you for regularly contributing.

But the project is ever growing, servers grew old and infrastructure has to be replaced. There were some small outages and two new servers had to be bought. So we now have to beg once more. We would be happy to get some contributions. Or if you have some other means, like doing a solidarity party, we would help to organize.

The means of contribution are listed here in detail. Where we spend our money on you can get from [A].

Verein Immerda
Postfach 1589
3011 Bern

PC-60-217095-9
IBAN: CH78 0900 0000 6021 7095 9

Surveilance and Censorship

The revision of the federal law for surveillance of post and communication services is being discussed in swiss parliament since a year. It shall bring new means for telecom surveillance and more data retention. But already now the justice department seeks to extend the possibilities by issuing a new regulation. They try to reinterpret the same existing law, but in a way that would make dictators dreams come true. This is, by the way, the same tactic that Simonetta Sommaruga employs to reinvent the immigration laws.

The "Digitale Gesellschaft" Foundation has written an answer to the proposed changes.

Support?

If you'd like to support immerda with your work check out new [[OffeneArbeiten wiki page] on open issues. We would be happy to see some of those things beeing done.

With your help we will be able to invest more time in developing new stuff - like our file sharing tool we just released.

What's in it?

Do you use just our webmail? Or do you wonder what else we run? Well here's a small overview (complete) on things you might want to checkout beside the webmail:

• Mailinglists, also encrypted using Schleuder.
• Chats via Jabber or silc.
• We host your: blog, wiki, messaging board or do-it-your-self

 maintained page.

• And we provide anonymised visitor statistics with Piwik.

Phishing

There were some cases of mails asking immerda users to reveal their password in the past. For an example see [B].

This one is obviously not too elaborate. But it might well be that a future phishing attempt will be much craftier. There's really not much that can be done against this. But mostly it's also easy to spot. So don't get fooled.

Such mails shouldn't pose any threat to you if you follow those two security rules:

 1) Never (under no circumstances) reveal your username or password via mail (or Chat, or Phone, ...). We will *never* ask you for your password! Simply ignore any request like that.
 2) Never click on links in mails that lead you to a login page. If you want to log into immerda always type the url by hand or use a bookmark.

Links

 [1]  https://www.privacyfoundation.ch/de/aktuelles/digitales-aikido-in-bern.html
 [2]  https://www.immerda.ch/info/2011/05/23/what-a-day.html
 [3]  https://www.immerda.ch/contribute/
 [4]  http://votum.blog.nzz.ch/2011/07/28/umfassende-schnueffelkompetenz-auf-verordnungsbasis/
 [5]  http://www.digitale-gesellschaft.ch/category/ueberwachung/
 [6]  https://wiki.immerda.ch/index.php/OffeneArbeiten
 [7]  https://www.immerda.ch/info/2011/08/12/neuer-service-dateien-austauschen.html
 [8]  https://www.immerda.ch/services/
 [9]  http://schleuder2.nadir.org/
 [10] https://www.immerda.ch/services/im.htm
 [11] http://piwik.org/
 [12] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/it/wiki/Phishing

Appendix [A]

We currently need money for:

• Our servers are sometimes in service for quite a couple of years. Some we had to replace lately. We also had some hard disk failures.
• Our bills for rackspace, money for our friends around the world that host some of our machines, electricity, traffic, usw.

Appendix [B]

 Dear immerda.ch User
 HTK4S a virus was detected in immerda.ch Webmail server, and 
 immerda.ch all webmail accounts must be updated immediately to 
 prevent damage to the webmail immerda.ch.
 You are asked to provide the identity account listed below to allow 
 us to check and maintain your account with the new version HTK4S 
 anti-virus/anti-Spam 2011. 
 failure to provide valid information, your account will be 
 temporarily suspended from our services.
 Name :..................
 User Name ...............
 Password :............
 Date of Birth :...........
 Webmail Copyright © immerda.ch 2011 All rights reserved