[CIMC-working] Fwd: [IMC-Tech] server issues

[Ian Bicking]

On Wed, 1969-12-31 at 16:59, donald goldhamer wrote:
> CIMCers,
> 
> Since we have been discussing relocating our service off of stallman... I
> thought some of the (security/legal) issues brought up in this note are of
> particular post-911 interest. 

Interesting... hosting everything in foreign countries seems potentially
difficult, though I can certainly understand the potential benefit. 
>From what they said, we actually seem to have a better situation
(legally) here than they do in Germany, so I'm not quite as concerned. 
But that's only for now: if legal issues drive them out of Germany now,
legal issues might drive us out of the US later.

I think we could stand to create a more portable system -- right now
it's hard to move our site (but certainly possible -- not that any of us
really know what's involved).  If we move, I would hope we could manage
it so that if we move again it will be easier.  We should probably also
think harder about mirroring, which adds a certain robustness to the
entire process -- especially foreign mirroring, which would make CIMC
much harder to shut down.  With a good mirror we could move the entire
site with a DNS change.

As far as logs go, I feel fairly confident that we can maintain
integrity -- to the degree we can do anything (since upstream logging is
always possible, and without our knowledge).  Some other sites are
keeping some form of an IP address, which maybe should be brought up on
tech.  There might be some other things we could do to maintain
integrity as well -- a lot of anti-cracking techniques could also be
used to detect when one administrator is coerced into logging or
otherwise changing the system.  Tom also brought up logging when I
talked to him, so I'm sure they are also take anonymity seriously.
 
  Ian