October 3rd, 2001 polarhome.com came to a dead-end of free shell providing
activity. The whole system was a disaster, even with raising popularity.
Therefore, system administrator gave a proposal to close polarhome.com in
his declaration.
During next few days administrator's mailbox was full of unsatisfied users
opinion, but among these letters were about 200 creative supporters that
thought that there is a possibility to continue with closer and more trustful
community, that can really focus on main goals of existence of this kind
of system.
It was easy to see that polarhome.com has to continue, but there were some
unanswered questions:
Dividing ftp from shell?
We made this decision because ftp is fare more harmless then shell and requires
much more knowledge and experience to turn it into attack. From other side
with open ftp, mail, POP3, IMAP access most of the users could continue to
use polarhome.com . They indeed, have been forced to change their mail reading
or file editing habits, but they still could continue to use earlier services
without interruption, including database administration etc.
Account creation should be slowed down.
In "free shell" period everybody could make a shell account in about 3 minutes.
Request from the web, wait 3 minutes, log in into your new shell account.
It was very popular method, that users liked very much. BUT as a non commercial
service provider, all system administrators (in that time just amec and taken
) worked as a kind volunteers... and sometimes it took few days to cover
up some malicious activity against remote hosts. So, 3 minutes to create
an account and few days to delete it... resulted that users do not have any
respect to their accounts. If I lose one... no problem, I can create 10
another.
Therefore we voted for hardcopy registration that takes at least 2-3 days...
Now, we have 2-3 days for account and 2-3 days to delete if it is necessary
(much better relation)... and as a side effect: user who waits few days for
something has more respect for it.
Banned hosts and networks
Earlier, the only way how could we ban some hacker was by deleting it's account
and ban his hosts and eventually whole network. Deleted account was not enough,
because few minutes later he could create a new account and use the system
with same rights and same purpose.
This method results with lot of innocent users that have been banned just
because they come from same domain or network as some single hacker. It was
not acceptable.
Therefore, we do not ban any domain or host any more. It is not necessary
because of slow shell registration process it is very uncommon to abuse the
shell.
Free or pay?
Also as earlier have been mentioned: to achieve better respect to own shell,
we decided to ask some symbolic admission or AKA step up fee. It is a normal
human (or should we call it homo sapience) behavior: if it is free
than who cares, but if I paid for it is mine.
Therefore, we decided to ask some kind of admission fee or step-up fee.
How high will be this fee?
Good question. If we ask $2 per month, it will be a very attractive fee and
we will be soon or later very rich... but is our goal to be rich or to give
a chance to the Internet generation to learn and be more experienced in networking,
communication and security area instead... give them a possibility to be
a member of amorph, multilingual and multinational community and to have
a respect to all other members. polarhome.com is used by users all around
the World and fixed price in one currency could put quite lot of users in
negative position, because for money does not have same value for US citizens
as for Brazilians or Romanians. In some countries people work whole month
or even more for $10.
Therefore, we decided to have some price that it should not be fixed and
should not be high, whatever part of the World user comes from. For this
pricing (10 currency units) nobody can say that it is expensive. Value is
about 2 beers or even less in almost every country. It is another question
that somebody does not want to pay for this kind of service at all.
What user gets for it?
If user pays for something, he wants to get something... also human behavior.
:-)
Therefore, shell have been improved. Space raised to 20M + 5M for mail and databases, crontab has been
allowed, Java installed, PostgreSQL installed, hardware have been upgraded
and made system more stable and secure. Hacking possibilities against localhost
have been forbidden to ensure users security.
... and here we are with the new system. Not everybody satisfied, but we
filtered out all these users that do not really belong to this community.
We, together build our system, vote for new shell, buy new hardware... gather
new knowledge.
polarhome.com is an independent, self managed, free community. Not big, but
brave.
You can send your opinion to
opinion@polarhome.com
Zoltan Arpadffy
polarhome.com
owner, system manager
Follow up:
http://www.polarhome.com/pipermail/polarhome/2002q2/000035.html
Three years later there was needed to apply some chages to this policy:
http://www.polarhome.com/pipermail/polarhome/2005q3/000062.html
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