Item 77. Minutes from the 2/23/99 Grex Board Meeting Scott Helmke (scott) Tue, Feb 23, 1999 (21:07). 101 lines, 15 responses. The meeting was held in Zingerman's Next Door in Ann Arbor. Present: John Remmers (remmers, President), Mary Remmers (mary), Scott Helmke (scott, board, acting Secretary for this meeting), Dan Gryniewicz (dang, board), Mark Conger (aruba, Treasurer), Charles Mitchell (arthurp), Sindi Keesan (keesan), STeve Andre' (steve, Board), Jim Diegert (jdeigert), Tim Ryan (tpryan), Drew (drew), Steve Gibbard (scg) Absent: Jan Wolter (Janc, Secretary) 8 Opening Gavel Pounding - remmers The meeting was gaveled to order at 6:38 pm 216 Treasurer's report - aruba income good so far (whoops, Mark forgot to give me the sheet before I left the meeting) spare parts fund: Since we don't need all the money we collected for the spare parts fundraiser, aruba was asking donors if they wanted their money back or wanted to let Grex keep it. Most have agreed to let it stay with Grex. auction $1700 pledged, so far received $1200. 5624 Publicity Committee - Misti nothing to report. 229 Technical Committee Problems with expansion memory card, being worked on. Donated disks not working yet, will be worked on some more. Trying to format disks on a 2nd system to avoid excess Grex downtime. Donated CPU card has been tested, works fine. Old staff line modem died, using spare GVC modem now Backup tapes purchased, backup done. Janc has written a daemon that helps stop certain vandal activities, limits use of excess memory. 21 Pumpkin Lease new lease for Pumpkin is available online; negotiated by Mary Remmers. Electricity is separate, which we will need to measure on a regular basis. Basically lease has a rent increase of 5%/year, can be renewed each year up to 5 times. We need liability insurance. Mary found a policy for $300/year from Hastings Mutual. There are some slight issues with exact wording on lease with regard to insurance. Motion: STeve moves that Grex pay up to $300 to purchase liability insurance. Misti seconds. Vote is 6-0-0, motion is passed. Motion: Aruba moves that Grex signs the lease for the Pumpkin, as posted on Grex. Dang seconds. Vote is 6-0-0, motion is passed. 554 Grex Logo Misuse An Internet site has been claiming that Grex is a partner, providing services (they claim to give out Unix shell accounts, which are really Grex accounts). Is this a violation of our trademark? STeve thinks this is some individual just fooling around, based on Web pages he found. STeve would like to send mail to admin at sites hosting these pages. Other organizations that are listed as "partners" may be taking legal action. Should this be handled by staff in the usual manner? General agreement to do it that way. We could probably make webnewuser reject this site, but that might not be worth the effort. STeve will work on this. 14412 Credit Cards - all Still gathering info on costs. Big discussion right now in Coop in is allowing a credit card to be used as ID for Grex membership. This would be useful in making membership easier (instead of having to mail in ID). STeve recommends we do this, since verification is now pretty good. Another issue is setting up a secure Web system to allow payments. "Certificates" for secure transactions could be expensive. Grex could work with a company that provides secure Web payments rather than setting up a physical system of our own. Dang will look into Web payment services. 374720 Computer Rescue - tpryan Tim has been selling salvaged 386 computers thru Kiwanis (as donations that Kiwanis can sell). Would like to use Grex to organize getting volunteers, finding donors and recipients. No board action needed. Scott and Dang, as members of Grex computer rehab committee are willing to pass the committee on to new people. Tpryan will enter an item in Coop. 231 Postal Scale Purchase - aruba treasurer could use a postal scale to predict auction shipping charges. Keesan donated a small scale during the meeting. 23 New Business - all STeve brought in a graph of Grex user growth. We are still growing. Freewheeling discussion of growth, possibility of Grexlike systems other people might start. Misti: has seen where people are being pointed to Grex for bots, cracker info, etc. Staff would like more info, email addresses. Aruba: finally sent tax exempt forms to Ameritech (2nd try). We could get several hundred dollars from refunds for the last 2 years. 606 Final Gavel Pounding - remmers The meeting was adjourned at 8:22 pm 15 responses total. ---------- (77) #1 Pete Vassoff (pfv) Wed, Feb 24, 1999 (01:07). 8 lines. You know.. I shoulda' posted this back in the other item dealing with the site that sez it's a "grex partner", but here we go: Why not leave it be, but intercept the info and reply with a message that explains why he is NOT affiliated and how to create an account properly? I mean, isn't he just trying to post the info to grex and then echo the response to the users browser? ---------- (77) #2 STeve Andre' (steve) Wed, Feb 24, 1999 (06:39). 2 lines. Because this person is claiming a false affiliation with Grex, thats why. ---------- (77) #3 Mary Remmers (mary) Wed, Feb 24, 1999 (08:06). 2 lines. Thanks for both taking the minutes and posting them so quickly, Scott. (Scott volunteered.) ---------- (77) #4 Scott Helmke (scott) Wed, Feb 24, 1999 (09:39). 2 lines. (Everybody kept *staring* at me when the Chair asked for a volunteer. It felt so *dirty*) ---------- (77) #5 Jan Wolter (janc) Wed, Feb 24, 1999 (11:59). 1 line. Thanks Scott. Sorry I couldn't make it. ---------- (77) #6 John Ellis Perry Jr. (jep) Wed, Feb 24, 1999 (12:34). 2 lines. No one figured out the agenda numbering scheme this month. What is it, remmers? (These things drive me nuts. (-: ) ---------- (77) #7 Richard J. Wallner (richard) Wed, Feb 24, 1999 (18:02). 25 lines. hmm...does grex actually own the trademark on the name "grex"? if not, grex may not be legally able to stop other sites from advertising it as a partner or in other ways invoking the grex name without permission. I know that some time ago, at least a year ago, someone in party told me grex was on a list of links on a pornography web site, listed as one of the "affiliates" of this site that would provide email addresses that users could use to send porn stories anonymously. It was how this user I was talking to end up using grex. This is where grex's open access policy could be more difficult to maintain down the road. Suppose the FBI goes after that web site, and subsequently goes after grex because it is listed as a link, and finds out grex has users storing lots of porno material in its files. But what can be done? I guess any site can advertise any other site as a link, whether they have permissions or not. Whether they have trademarks or not. permission or not. As long as grex is open access I guess grex is going to be that feature used and abused by other sites. ---------- (77) #8 Steve Gibbard (scg) Wed, Feb 24, 1999 (23:36). 6 lines. Grex claims a trademark to the word Grex. If I understand trademark law correctly, as long as we consistently try to protect the trademark, it stays legal, but if we let lots of random organizitions use it without question, and then try to stop one particular use, we wouldn't have a case. The grex.com site is Graphic Expressions, not Grex. ---------- (77) #9 Ken Josenhans (krj) Thu, Feb 25, 1999 (11:09). 3 lines. I'm not sure trademark is relevant. "Melonite" isn't claiming to be Grex or offering a competing service called "Grex;" they/he are falsely claiming an affiliation. IANAL. ---------- (77) #10 Andrew J. Lanagan (drew) Sun, Feb 28, 1999 (15:14). 5 lines. No mention seems to have been made of mary remmers' information about the impending disposal of 2000 computers (486 and Pentium) by a hospital due to the BIOSes being non-Y2K-compliant. Depending on how much could be netted for each computer (sale price minus new BIOS chip), it could set grex up for life. ---------- (77) #11 STeve Andre' (steve) Sun, Feb 28, 1999 (15:34). 2 lines. It won't happen. I have more details on it, and we aren't going to be able to get into the loop on that. ---------- (77) #12 E R Bassey (other) Mon, Mar 1, 1999 (06:18). 2 lines. um itd is doing a $2 mil computer upgrade over this week. any volunteers to stand guard at property disposition? ---------- (77) #13 STeve Andre' (steve) Mon, Mar 1, 1999 (08:20). 5 lines. Heh. They'll put them on pallets and try to sell them one at a time, or by the pallet. Unforunately for us, they frequenty get outragously high prices on things, so we aren't going to feed on this round of goodies. (sigh) ---------- (77) #14 Rick Green (rtg) Thu, Mar 11, 1999 (03:28). 13 lines. It's a shame what people are being scared into spending over the y2k issue. Of the computers I've tested, I've seen several that 'failed' the y2k century rollover test, yet even those would retain a year 2000 date across power cycles and reboots, once set manually. What this means, is that if the computer is running at midnight, dec 31st, it will start reporting 1900 dates, but if it's turned off while we're at the party, and the date is set manually at next power-on, then everything proceeds fine from there. A one-time, 30-second circumvention is not a good reason, IMO, to spend millions on replacing computers. ..And I'm angry because I'm too damned honest to benefit from the windfall this paranoia is raining down upon those willing to go along with the joke. ----------