Actually, it's a long story. First of all, the barbie list need not be ezone-affiliated. it could and should have a life of its own, though i plan to participate. ezone has a nice offer from rice.edu to host the site and stand up to the bullying (something our previous .edu was unwilling to do), *but* they won't host the domain name, or any unusual scripts, not sure about our search engine (glimpseHTTP). they'll let me pay pobox.com, say, to redirect a virtual hostname, but that will still resolve to aaln.org on people's browser address windows and their bookmarks etc., so it's ugly and constitutes a chilling effect of the censorship attempt already.

I was wondering. I've known of some households with T-1's and some business coops, but a community coop is a great idea.

The funny thing is, as far as mattel knows, ezone.org is the top of the line. they never *found* our underlying .edu, which got cold feet of its own accord.

Really?! This is a generous offer. Is there some minimal or marginal overhead cost that should really be defrayed, if only at cost?

I have no problem with that. Ironically, when the first college offered to host us (when we had to leave the berkeley server we started on), they hesitated when we asked them to host the domain (we didn't want to ever have to change the url again), because they wanted credit or the clear sense that we were part of them, sort of like the way ms wanted slate to be slate.msn.com, right? anyway, they went along with it, but it's funny to have the provider want to be anonymous. that's better for us, too, since it means we don't have to point someone like mattel's lawyer at an obvious target.

Yowza! You know, I was willing to settle for what Rice was willing to do, but I'm getting very tempted to take you up on your offer. I guess we'd have to figure out the real impact of hosting enterzone and the real long-term cost or half-life of this solution. But, wow, thanks. Did I say that already?

I think we average under 2000 hits a day, and that's been pretty steady for a long time. we're not on some steroidal supergrowth hormone. we have no ads, no pressure to push our fame or anything. we just want to be able to keep doing what we're doing, and have the entire archive of the 'zine live in the present.

Not sure how to measure bandwidth. The diskspace seems to be about 100 meg right now, although that probably included some deadwood I've never bothered to prune. We're fairly low-tech, but we expect to gradually include more .ra files and bigger things like that. i have a dream of a 3d vr ezone but not a lot of time to pursue all of those glimmers of ideas.