[sword-devel] Sanctions and CrossWire

[Troy A. Griffitts]

I too am saddened by the situation with Ukraine.

From a policy standpoint, I don't believe CrossWire has any place in offering services beyond producing and offer Bible software resources.

From a practical standpoint, I agree with MPJ. In a sense you're asking the equivalent of, do any of us have a capable server in our basement we might offer to provide email services to friends to avoid any government crackdowns in Russia during this time? From my standpoint, an anonymous server in a basement is much better than considering using our publicly identifiable server. This would be dangerous for our future ability to carry out our mandate in parts of the world and worst case would draw an attack we can't withstand, preventing us from operating today. But even better than an anonymous server in a basement, there are better equipped public mail services out there better suited to withstand any reprisal from the Russian gov't. Both, public mail services and then a private anonymous solution are much better alternatives.

Having said this, we have always offered mail services to our active members that want a more official email address when communicating with other organizations as they offer their work for CrossWire.

Troy


On March 10, 2022 2:05:55 PM MST, Michael Johnson <Michael at eBible.org> wrote:
>On 3/10/22 10:33, Peter von Kaehne wrote:
>> A fair number of our contributors are Russian and might have now difficulties accessing usual resources including possibly email and else or might get into that place soon enough.
>>
>> Can I propose that all regular CW programmer and those of sub projects from within Russia are offered CrossWire email addresses? I do not think this undermines the sanction regime , which I fully support, but keeps those who are brothers and sisters together and involved in something which had the greatest power to create peace.
>>
>> Thoughts?
>
>That is a nice thought, Peter. However, I discovered years ago that while it is theoretically simple to set up any number of email addresses on a server I operate, keeping them operating through server failures and upgrades plus fighting the increasingly complex spam wars is hard. In almost every case, I found it better to refer people to one of the many free email providers <https://clean.email/best-free-email-service-providers>. Of course, that might require use of a VPN, right now, to work from Russia, 
>which Russia is likely to make more difficult, just like their neighbor, China, does. Another issue is the reduction in bandwidth in and out of Russia due to 2 backbone providers pulling out, which actually makes it harder to use any email.
>
>That said, there are some people in Russia that I wouldn't hesitate to provide emails for on crosswire.org or one of my domains, if I thought it would help. I'm just not sure, right now, if it really would. Russia may regard use of a crosswire.org email address as undermining their government or something strange like that. In hostile government environments, it is often better to use generic email domains, and not to stand out in any way just based on the address. My address would be particularly bad for 
>an anti-Christian government, for example. I'm all for punishing the aggressive rulers of Russia for their sins against Ukraine. I just don't want to see this hinder any Bible translation or publication work in Russia. If anything, totalitarian governments tend to be scared of the Holy Bible. We may need to shift communication with some of these brothers and sisters to rely more heavily on secure messaging services.
>
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