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There might be outages this Friday

Epik, who is our domain registrar and the owner of our DDoS-protection/CDN service BitMitigate and our webhost Sibyl, has informed us that there is scheduled upgrades to their major equipment. And that some brief outages may occur this Friday. This means that all Sandia Mesa websites, including our mail servers, may be out for about 15-30 minutes at some time on Friday, December 6th, 2019. We apologize about any inconvenience this may cause.

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American companies should use their power to extend important civil liberties to LGBTQ+ people

Every year since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges that same-sex marriage is legal in the United States, Sandia Mesa has changed its social media icon to a version of their social media icon with a rainbow background during the month of June. However, we don’t simply do this because we want publicity points. We don’t do this just to profit off of rainbow decorated stuff exclusively available only during one month. We do this to celebrate a remarkable moment for civil rights in United States history. But more importantly, we do this because we truly believe that regardless of the personal beliefs of anybody who works with us, LGBTQ+ people deserve the same rights to publish and express their thoughts and ideas as everyone else.

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How should buying movies and show episodes on the internet work?

During the 1970s, a revolutionary change occurred. Particularly in the way we watched shows and movies. Before, most feature films were rarely accessible to the public. You had to either go the movie theater when they were showing it or hope that it would air on TV sometime soon. Now, you had the technologies of VCR. This meant that you could record a video tape of a favorite show or movie that was airing on TV and then watch it whenever you wanted to. Because this technology was relatively new, there was major competition in the field of videocassette formats – most notably between Sony’s Betamax and JVC’s VHS (and we all know that VHS ultimately won).

Today, we’re in the midst of another revolution in the way we watch shows and movies. No longer are a majority of us watching movies and shows on cable TV, DVD, or Blu-Ray. We’re watching them on the internet through streaming services. And like the competition between videocassette formats in the 1970s, we’re seeing competition between different online video streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu, HBO Go, and Prime Video.

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The Rise and Fall of Vidme and why Freedom of Speech is so important today

Today marks the 1st anniversary of the closing of Vidme, which was a startup alternative to YouTube based in LA. It had so much potential when we first joined their small video-sharing platform in 2016. In fact, we were so sure it was gonna succeed and become a huge competitor to YouTube, we decided to switch there full-time. However, the platform would unfortunately come apart fairly quickly and we would have to put our eggs in other baskets, such as LBRY and BitChute. But in order to understand how we got here, we must first take a step back and look at the early history of Vidme, what they advertised themselves to be, the strong community that was held during its existence, and ultimately, how the platform came apart.

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