The Mandelbear's Musings

Using code from SopaBlackout.org, I'm going to be blacking out the following websites tomorrow to protest the evil, evil bills called SOPA (House) and PIPA (Senate). You'll be able to click through to the actual site.

• steve.savitzky.net
• lookingglassfolk.com
• tempered-glass.info
• tres-gique.com
• pocketpoems.net
• thestarport.org

I'd say "sorry for the inconvenience", but I'm not. It's worth a little inconvenience to help prevent a disaster. Deal. Then write to your congresspeople. Ask them whether they're working for a handful of huge media corporations, or their constituents.

You can find out more here and here.

And listen to The Day The LOLCats Died

So now they've added a "flag this post" icon to the toolbar, right to the left of the "next post" icon, that lets you flag somebody else's post as containing (pick one) Explicit Adult Content, Offensive Content, Hate Speech, Illegal Activity, Nude Images of Minors.

And you can flag your journal, or an entry, as containing "adult concepts", whatever the hell that means. It blocks users who gave their age as under 14 when they signed up. (My younger daughter joined back before they allowed under-13's to join. I was there. I told her to lie about it. Nothing in this post should be taken as advice.)

Details, such as they are, here in lj_biz.

Excuse me; I have to go take my blood pressure meds.

This post by technoshaman points to annathepiper's recent post, which indicates that word of the latest LJ kerfluffle has been spreading, getting as far as Firefox News.

Now, whether Abe Hassan's comments on efw can reasonably be construed as "insulting to fandom" or merely a misguided and tactless attempt to get into the spirit of the Existential Flame War, the fact is that people have been construing it as an insult, adding to a rising tide of cynicism and anger. There is no doubt whatever that Hassan is a SixApart employee who makes official announcements on news, and should have known better (added) than to stick his oar into a hornet's nest (to mix a metaphor slightly).

There's an interesting contradiction in LJ's Terms of Service: Section XIV.2 seems to say that they have to notify you before they take anything down:

Should any Content that you have authored be reported to LiveJournal as being offensive or inappropriate, LiveJournal might call upon you to retract, modify, or protect (by means of private and friends only settings) the Content in question within a reasonable amount of time, as determined by the LiveJournal staff. Should you fail to meet such a request from LiveJournal staff, LiveJournal may terminate your account. LiveJournal, however, is under no obligation to restrict or monitor journal Content in any way;

... but section XVI says

You agree to NOT use the Service to:

1. Upload, post or otherwise transmit any Content that is unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, tortious, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, libelous, invasive to another's privacy (up to, but not excluding any address, email, phone number, or any other contact information without the written consent of the owner of such information), hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable; [my emphasis]

... and ends with:

If LiveJournal determines, in its sole and absolute discretion, that any user is in violation of the TOS, LiveJournal retains the right to terminate such user's account at any time without prior notice.

Which gives them a loophole they can drive a stretch hummer through, and they've obviously been invoking this clause with a heavy hand to please whatever entities are yanking their chain this week. It's an open question whether this loophole is a recent addition to the TOS, and whether it would get them into trouble if it came down to a court battle. I wouldn't count on it.

Bottom line: don't trust 'em. Back up your posts yourself, and start looking for a way to move your primary blog to a host -- or multiple hosts -- under your own control. To your scattered servers go, in other words.

Live Journal Attacked by Inocents (?) by panGloss

A rather more likely rumour is that LJ at first held firm, confident they were protected by the CDA, but panicked when WFI began going round their advertisers suggesting that LJ was not a nice place to hang out. This seems to have lead to a rather panicky surge of deletions of communities and journals. A more helpful approach would probably have been to have identified, before deletion or suspension, which communities were at least devoted to incest survivor support, and spared them the trouble of protest.

There are several opinions expressed that I don't agree with, but then it's an outsider. Some of them are answered in the comments, so keep scrolling.

See this post by czircon.

Despite the latest half-assed "apology", it doesn't look as though LJ is getting any of my respect, my trust or my money anytime soon.

Go read this post by ravan -- it's a line-by-line response to this post on news. It says a lot of what I'm thinking, only much better than I could have.

Let me put it another way: just because I now have censorship on my list of interests doesn't mean that I approve of it, any more than having La Marseillaise there means that I'd like to see "impure blood water our furrows". Though I might make exceptions in certain cases. Interest does not imply liking, no matter what their moronic sidebar says.

LJ seems to be deleting journals and communities based on the presence of trigger words in their interests lists; for the most part these are fanfic, but the set also includes survivors of child abuse (that being one of the triggers).

To show Six Apart how many of their users are fans, the fandom_counts community has been started. You can join it here. Then post a pointer to alert the rest of your flist. I first got it from filkertom.

Sometime later tonight I'll post about what I think can be done. Hint -- it does not depend on persuading 6A to change their policies, nor on finding a friendlier provider.