First, a bunch of big THANK YOU!s go out to several people who dropped some cash on us during the annual "October Crunch" when we usually just up and run out of money long before we run out of bills. And a special THANK YOU goes to Mr. Anony Mous, who dropped $300 into that empty coffee can we call the bank, and then a bit later dropped another $300 just in case the first wasn't enough! Wow! And it was just in time, too. You know who you are. You all know who you are, and THANK YOU once again!

Now, about SPAM. Turns out it wasn't that ncc-1776.org and lneilsmith.org were reported to Spamhaus.org, it was that both are (were) hosted on "shared servers" with a "shared IP Address"—and ONE of the other people sharing were the ones sending SPAM. Mark Odell outlines all of this in somewhat incomprehensible detail in a letter in this issue—I'm not a system administrator or a network administrator and I mostly don't know what he's talking about, but that does seem to be what happened.

Turns out it was an outfit called http://www.insurance-solutions.info/ that was SPAMming (don't bother going looking, they have been suspended, kicked off, and banned from the hosting service. In fact they were suspended, kicked-off, and banned almost right away. However, instead of listing the domain name insurance-solutions.info, the fookin' idiots at Spamhaus.org blacklisted the shared IP Address. In other words, punish everybody in the classroom for the wrong-doings of one student. . . just like elementary school. Or was it Junior High? I forget, but I remember my outrage back then, for the same reason I was and am outraged by this. I think the collectivist/nazi/fascist/commie jackasses who run Spamhaus.org should be horsewhipped, but that's just me.

And, while trying to get the other idiots to fix things, you know, the ones who run my hosting service, I seem to have caused them to somehow trash lneilsmith.org and ncc-1776.org—and whenever I ask them what's going on (such as paying twice and still being listed as expired). . . well, they say a "Senior Admin" is looking into it.

So, you won't be seeing this issue on the web for a while, until I wrest the domain names from serverway.net, or plan-pc.com or whoever it is that now is my hosting service. I'm not completely sure anymore. And when I asked for an explanation, well, that Old. . . I mean Senior Admin is still looking into it. Or at it. Or for it.

In fact, we may be appearing as ncc-1776.flapdoodle or something when you see us again. At least thanks to Mr. Anony Mous, we've got enough cash on hand to get a better class of web hosting service. I hope.

And when I just tried (Monday the 23rd) to send email Thank You!s to donors, I find Spamhaus is still blacklisting our shared IP Address, even though the offenders have been kicked off our shared servers! It's sort of like skinny-dipping in toxic waste dumps these days. Anyway, should any of our readers wish to help try and keep us going, you can make donations on this page right here:

http://www.ncc-1776.org/donate.html

And don't forget to use our Affiliate Links to buy you and yours the things you buy online anyway. That's another way to put some spare change in our pocket. You'll find those links all over this thing.

Ken Holder
Editor
editor@ncc-1776.org