Photo: Carissa Rogers/Flickr
Yesterday Motherboard reported that the Chaos Computer Club's jabber server, used by many journalists and activists around the world for encrypted communication, had ceased operating "intentionally" under mysterious circumstances.Today in a blog post on its home page, the CCC announced that the jabber server would resume service tomorrow.But the members of the CCC really don't want you to rely on its server."Unfortunately, [the CCC jabber] server was so well received it became the de facto central service of the hacker crowd," the announcement said. "This is running contrary to the idea we always advocated: Practice decentralization and run many interconnected servers. We therefore wish to combine this announcement of the continuation of jabber.ccc.de with a strong appeal again to run your own jabber servers!"
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The announcement did not fully explain the reasons behind the server outage, although the organization did say that it was not due to a legal threat, which some users were worried about."The temporary discontinuation of the service became necessary since some users have incorrect assumptions about its nature," the CCC wrote today. "Jabber.ccc.de is a piece of infrastructure that is run by volunteers in their spare time. To use it is a privilege and not a right. To prevent incidents that might trigger another service discontinuation, new rules for the usage of jabber.ccc.de will be introduced and published soon."According to the announcement, the existing team of jabber admins will be replaced by a new group of volunteers. The announcement included a shout out to the outgoing jabber admins for their years of unpaid service."Many thanks to the current team of admins for ten years of reliable work!""Run your own jabber servers!"