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The TZ mailing list just received the following message from Arthur David Olson:

A civil suit was filed on September 30 in federal court in Boston; I'm a defendant; the case involves the time zone database.

The ftp server at elsie.nci.nih.gov has been shut down.

The mailing list will be shut down after this message.

Electronic mail can be sent to me at arthurdavidolson@gmail.com.

The lawsuit in question appears to be "Astrolabe, Inc. v. Olson et al", if anyone's curious.

Is anyone setting up an alternative mailing list or FTP site for TZ users? I'd hate to see us all duplicating our efforts.

Thanks!

Mike G.
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    I really don't understand why people feel like they need to downvote questions some times. comp.time.tz seems to be a usenet group publishing info, where the mailing list targets. So, stay on that, that can't disappear. As for an ftp of the source, I would think that another one will pop up very shortly, [judging by the list of products which utilize the source files](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database#Use_in_software_systems). – mbrownnyc Oct 06 '11 at 20:05
  • Thanks. But I don't see comp.time.tz. I see gmane.comp.time.tz, but that's just a mirror of the shut-down mailing list, I think. Of course, I'm looking on google groups - that may not be as good a source for usenet groups as it used to be... – Mike G. Oct 06 '11 at 21:05
  • It's included in just about every Linux distribution on the planet, so there are already FTP "mirrors" in abundance. – mithrandi Oct 06 '11 at 23:12
  • mithrandi, that's not what I'm concerned about. The important part of the mailing list and FTP site was the ability to get quick updates when some politician somewhere decides to be seen "doing something" by changing their country's DST transition dates. http://dateandtime.com is a good source for news about those changes, but it doesn't provide updated TZ files to go with them (although they were very good about notifying the mailing list). – Mike G. Oct 07 '11 at 00:52
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    Mike, pretty simple. Why don't you just send a mail to the mailing list (was it already shutdown?) and start your own mailing list? From what I was reading that usenet group is actually just a recipient/subscriber of the mailing list, not just "a mirror." – mbrownnyc Oct 07 '11 at 01:58
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    The "mailing list" was something maintained by hand by ado. But happily, iana had set up a clone of it, which is an actual mailing list with a list server and prepopulated it with the ado-list membership. So the list is now active as tz@iana.org. – Mike G. Oct 07 '11 at 13:01
  • Important background on what led up to this lawsuit! http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2011-October/007976.html –  Oct 12 '11 at 04:24

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Answering my own question, it looks like a copy of the mailing list is now active at tz@iana.org. A mirror of the ftp site is up at munnari.oz.au.

Mike G.
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    In case you missed it: http://packetstormsecurity.org/news/view/20008/ICANN-Steps-In-To-Host-The-Timezone-DB.html – mbrownnyc Oct 18 '11 at 17:42