The Mandelbear's Musings

Recently, crossposts to Livejournal have been failing -- not every time, but often enough to be a problem. The most recent failures were

1. mdlbear | Thankful Thursday
2. mdlbear | Done Since 2020-05-31
3. mdlbear | Done Since 2020-05-10

If this fails to crosspost I'll paste it in by hand, but I'm not (currently) equipped to do that on a regular basis. I may never bother: it's not particularly complicated, but it's messy. In any case, it will have to wait until I have a command-line client that can PUT as well as POST, because I'm not about to do it by hand.

(Crossposted by hand to https://mdlbear.livejournal.com/1729513.html).

It's been a week. Not only are we moving house, a large number of people are moving from LJ to Dreamwidth. I'd already mostly moved, and since I have a permanent account I'm not likely to leave completely, but I've been reducing my exposure -- the entire journal is marked "adults only" and I've taken off all of my interests and most of my personal details. I also gathered together and posted a few notes on the process, under the tag ljexit. Feel free to crosslink, and to use the tag yourself.

Monday was a bit rough, both emotionally and physically exhausting, from spending all day at Rainbow's End organizing and sorting. I did some finishing-up Tuesday night, taking advantage of a dentist appointment and the resulting personal day, when our mover failed to show up. (We found out later that he'd been in an auto accident on the way up.)

Tuesday night was miserable and mostly sleepless, and I woke up on Wednesday with a queasy stomach and muscle aches. It was a close enough match for flu that I called in sick. As it turned out, though, it's more likely to have been physical overwork, lack of sleep, dehydration, and low blood sugar from having been thinking about things other than self-care for much the previous two days.

Thursday at 1pm our listing went live: 4126 37th Ave SW, Seattle, Washington 98126 | The Warmack Group. If you're reading this and interested, the open house is this weekend, and you only have a couple more days to get an offer in.

Friday I got in to work late, having gone with N. to look at another house. I very much wanted to get in to work for the last meeting of the day, with $BOSS and $HR_PERSON. Um... yeah. I've been offered an "early" retirement package. (Scare quotes because it would be only a couple of months before my target date.) I may very well take it. The emotional roller-coaster ride one might expect from having to look reality in the face from up close, but at this point I think I'm ready.

Saturday -- yesterday -- Naomi and I went to look at The Dome House in Monroe. It was magical. Almost perfect for us -- EXCEPT: it's isolated as heck, at the end of a mile of twisty, narrow, gravel road. Haul the garbage to the dump yourself. Lots of unpermitted, unfinished construction in the barn. It would have been perfect for who we were 20 years ago. *sigh* I wouldn't have missed seeing it, but it makes me sad to have to pass it up. N called it the other end of the rainbow. Had a great talk with the owner, who is moving to someplace dryer for health reasons.

So that's the week. I'm glad it's over.

( Notes & links, as usual )

If you use Livejournal, you will already have seen the pop-up demanding that you agree to their new terms of service. med_cat has an excellent partial translation and analysis. A full copy of the agreement can be found in archangelbeth | And the translation of the New User Agreement for Livejournal

I will add more as they come in. The salient points are:

• [The user must] Mark Content estimated by Russian legislation as inappropriate for children (0 −18) as “adult material” by using Service functions.
  Who the heck knows what this includes? Play it safe.
• The user may not:
  • without the Administration’s special permit, use automatic scripts (bots, crawlers etc.) to collect information from the Service and/or to interact with the Service;
    Which arguably covers backing up to DW or your local hard drive.
  • post advertising and/or political solicitation materials unless otherwise directly specified in a separate agreement between User and the Administration;
    This presumably covers promoting one's CDs or other ventures.

Many of my friends are leaving altogether. I don't blame them.

What I have done:

• I post no original content on LJ -- it's all cross-posted from here on Dreamwidth.
• Copied all LJ content -- posts and comments -- over to Dreamwidth.
• Comments on cross-posts are disabled; the footer has a link to the corresponding DW post.
• I use LJ only to read comments and posts that are not on Dreamwidth. I read DW first so that I can skip cross-posts that don't have comments.
• I have started to take people who no longer allow comments on LJ off my friends list.
• Effective immediately, I am marking my journal as "adult content", and disabled my participation in "user rankings".
• I have reduced the amount of information shown in my profile. In particular, I have removed my list of interests.
• I have taken my website link off the journal headers and out of my profile. If you want more information, look at my DW profile.

Future action:

• Sometime in mid-April, I will disable comments altogether on LJ, at which point all existing comments will be hidden. They've already been copied over to Dreamwidth, so nothing will be lost. This is for your protection, in case you've posted a comment that could be construed as violating Russian law.
• At some point, I will stop cross-posting, both because of the legal risk and as a protest.
• At some further point, I may delete all or most of my posts, or possibly replace them with links to the corresponding posts on DW.

Sorry, LJ. We had a great time together, but I think it's best for both of us if we go back to being just friends. OK?

And I'm not saying you treated me unkind / You could have done better, but I don't mind / You just kinda wasted my precious time. / Don't think twice, it's all right.

So 2017 started with an inch of snow on the ground, and the entire week has been unseasonably cold. Welcome to global warming? I spent most of last week trying, with limited success, to catch up on the things I'd fallen behind on over my week of vacaton. I may survive the month.

Now that LJ has moved its servers to Russia (dropping HTTPS and at least a hundred pro-Ukraine blogs in the process), it seemed like a good time to disable comments on my crossposts and direct all comments to Dreamwidth. If you're reading this on LJ you can comment there with OpenID as [yourname]@livejournal.com. But I think you'd be better off making yourself a Dreamwidth account, importing your LJ, and crossposting. Just ask if you need help -- I've been giving out lots of advice.

The other news is that we (N and I) bought a new (to us) car -- it's a 2004 Honda Odyssey which (who?) seems to be going by the name Rosie.

We have also done quite a bit of cleaning-up and downsizing; first order of business is to get the downstairs cleared out so it can have a new floor and kitchen cabinets installed. Needs doing.

... and yesterday I transplanted my storage server into a small case. It's back on the mini-ITX board I'd had it on for the last couple of years; the smaller case makes a lot more room on the shelf. Downsizing.

Looks like it's going to be an interesting year. Lots of adventures. Nasty, uncomfortable things.

( Notes & links, as usual )

Just in case you were wondering just how private your LJ is now that the server's in Moscow, we have:

  : wget https://mdlbear.livejournal.com
    --2016-12-30 16:59:04--  https://mdlbear.livejournal.com/
    Resolving mdlbear.livejournal.com (mdlbear.livejournal.com)... 81.19.74.1
    Connecting to mdlbear.livejournal.com (mdlbear.livejournal.com) [...]
    HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 301 Moved Permanently
    Location: http://mdlbear.livejournal.com/ [following]
    --2016-12-30 16:59:11--  http://mdlbear.livejournal.com/

... which means they are deliberately downgrading the connection from https to http. Wouldn't surprise me if blocking Dreamwidth is next.

Several security-minded people on my reading list have been moving from Livejournal to Dreamwidth; some have even deleted their LJ accounts. Meanwhile, huge numbers of Russians have been moving their blogs to Dreamwidth. Apparently LJ has quietly moved all of their servers from the US to Russia. That LJ availability glitch a couple of days ago? Yeah, that. A large spike in the number of new Dreamwidth accounts being created by Russians.

As for me, I'm not changing much: I don't lock posts (I think I have maybe two or three, and those are merely somewhat embarrassing), I post only to DW, and I and have it set up to crosspost to LJ. I have permanent accounts in both places, so dropping LJ wouldn't be denying them any money at this point.

There are some things you can do:

1. Get an account at Dreamwidth.org if you don't already have one.
2. Set it up to crosspost to your LJ account. Unlike LJ, Dreamwidth is a US-based organization that, unlike LJ, is entirely supported by its users.
3. Every so often, back up your LJ journal to DW.
4. Subscribe to the DW journals of all your old LJ friends. Note that DW separates your access-control list from your reading list -- none of this abuse of the term "friend" that LJ does.
5. Don't post any secrets! Especially not to livejournal. Go back and delete anything you wouldn't want to be read by any three-letter agency on either side of the pond.

( Notes from today's investigations: )

Let's put it this way: regardless of whether LJ has actually transferred your journal to a server in Russia, you should consider the privacy of your livejournal to have been breached.

Sorry to be the bear of bad news.

ETA: LiveJournal servers moved to Russia: darkoshi

As some people have pointed out, this doesn't change very much. Sure, it adds support for the notion that LJ's Russian owners are slime, but we already knew that. Move to DW, set up crossposting, delete all non-public posts, don't give LJ any more money, and carry on.

ETA 12-30 Looks like DNS updates have finally propagated:

  : Geolocation data from IP2Location (Product: DB6, updated on 2016-12-5)
    Domain Name	     	  	Country		     	Region	City
    mdlbear.livejournal.com	Russian Federation 	Moskva	Moscow
    ISP					Organization	Latitude	Longitude
    Rambler Internet Holding LLC	Not Available	55.752220153809	37.615558624268

(thanks to: The Mad Filkentist)

Because of the recent major increase in anonymous spam comments on LJ, I have disabled them there. Either register, or come on over to Dreamwidth where anonymous comments are still enabled. Besides, I can always use more comments on the DW side.

Also, I've pretty much stopped posting "hippo birdie" posts, in part because the LJ portal is going away, and in part because I've taken the LJ portal and home page off my "AM" list. They were pretty useless to begin with and have become more so. With the demise of birthday posts, I now have no unique content on LJ -- it's all cross-posted from DW.

Dear LJ:

Despite what status.livejournal.com says, your site is almost completely FUBAR. I can get to my friends page and parts of my profile, but that's it. And you have started sending me email in HTML instead of text.

No love,

==mdlbear

My previous post didn't cross-post to LJ; this makes me grumpy. We'll see if this one works -- I'm guessing it won't, either.

ETA: and indeed it didn't.

... so what was I doing while LJ was down? Mostly system administration, I suspect. Between making the YD's Windows 7 computers print on our home network, and backing up the failing backup drive, it's been a long week. Oh, and replacing ink cartridges and cleaning print heads.

I went to Fry's and got a couple of hot-swap holders for SATA drives; I'll use one of those for the backup drive. Once I get it loaded. It would have gone a heck of a lot faster if I'd figured out that I needed to transfer the monthly incrementals last if I wanted to restore hard links correctly. *sigh*

Meanwhile, the good news is that the UBF had a hearing yesterday and got slapped with a restraining order keeping him out of a 300yd zone that just happens to include our house. So he won't be staying over any more.

Just one walk, on Thursday. This was partly due to getting a severe leg cramp last Sunday. But I did get in some singing, which was good.

And a lot of puttering in the office. A pretty good week, modulo the pain.

Lots of links in the notes. xkcd: Lanes is the one to go to; may be triggery if you have cancer. The debt limit fiasco continues to be top news; solarbird has been writing it up. Go look.

I will not be cross-posting my LJ comments or links to them on twitter, facebook, or any other social network. I may conceivably cross-post my own posts between Dreamwidth and LJ, though in which direction is unclear, and I haven't done it yet. I may conceivably cross-post my twitter updates to LJ via one of the usual culprits; currently it doesn't represent enough bandwidth to be worthwhile.

I try hard never to put links to other peoples' locked posts anyplace in my LJ, even in friends-locked posts, because I know that some people don't even want the existence of their locked posts known. Similarly, I don't put links to my own locked posts anywhere except in other posts on the same filter.

If I make a comment on somebody's locked post that I think is worth making public, you'll find it here with all the serial numbers carefully filed off.

I actively encourage people to link to my public posts, and have no problem having my LJ name associated with my real one. However, when I finally get around to establishing a presence on Facebook, it will not link back here. The last thing I need is FB rummaging around in my friends list.

Another day that turned out to be more tiring and unproductive than expected. And I can already see that the next month is going to be full of more of the same: distressing paperwork, difficult phone calls, expensive deadlines, some of them likely to be missed because things fell off the queue. It would be good if I can find my way to a "just do whatever you have to" space that enables me to slog through it all without too much damage.

I did get in some practicing; I'm getting a lot more comfortable with Bm now. About time. And I'm re-exploring a more bass-heavy picking style that works well with some of the Norwescon material.

And I made some good progress on sorting receipts.

I spent quite a lot of time fighting web applications. I HATE ZIMBRA! And something embedded in my LJ friends' page broke the user interface -- navigation keys didn't work, nor did the middle mouse button. Wasted a couple of hours debugging it; it was gone by evening, as things fell off the end.

Good links under the cut. Go read.

I'm probably going to have to start following The Introvert's Corner on Psychology Today. The post that got me started was "Chit-chat, Happiness and You", on the importance of deep conversations.

The purchase of Livejournal by a Russian-owned company raised questions at the time of SUP's commitment to LJ's long-standing relationship with its user community, for good and ill. The recent decision to drop the ad-free Basic account is "a business decision. It is, emphatically." It may however be a poor business decision, one made in the hopes of making a fast buck off the content provided by the users without understanding the background of those users' relationship with the site. The removal, for whatever reason, of possibly controversial interests gives users good reason to worry that we are not wanted on a site we helped make so popular. The restoration of those interests, allowing us our thoughts on yaoi once more, does not immediately restore our faith in the company, especially with the clandestine removal of the primary way in which most of us first came to the site (and then brought our friends).

In short, Livejournal users no longer feel like customers, but product, and that's bad business all around.

The 24 hour LJ content strike begins at midnight GMT on Friday, which works out to 5pm here on the US West Coast.

It will be a largely futile gesture; I was originally not going to participate. But after reading this interview with Anton Nosik of SUP (the new owners), [he provides a response here], I was sufficiently infuriated to join in. This despite the fact that theljstaff, hiding behind a pseudonym in an obscure account, has posted a half-hearted apology. beckyzoole lists some reasons for going through with the strike here.

Do I think the strike will have any effect whatever on LJ? No. But it will have an effect on those who participate, and on those who read our journals. LJ has, once again, shown its total contempt for its users. Fine. The strike is our gesture of our contempt for them. Sure, it's the equivalent of shaking your fist at the bus that just splashed mud on you as it drove by. But it feels good. See you tomorrow.

As most of my flist probably knows by now, LJ has added a controversial new feature called Explore LJ - you can see the actual page here. It looks a lot like Google News, only restricted to LJ.

Although I think it's a transparent attempt to monetize user-generated content, I don't think it's a privacy violation, and I'm not going to opt out. Here's why: I want my blog to be noticed.

Sitting in my front closet right now are about 500 copies of Coffee, Computers, and Song. If a few thousand more people get pointed to it and a few dozen of them decide to buy a copy, I'm not going to complain. At all.

For similar reasons, my LJ is indexed on Google and any other search engine that cares to drink from the firehose of LJ's live feed. I rarely friends-lock, and consider anything I post to be public. I have a long history of this, going back to my days in alt.callahans, and it's too late to back out now even if I wanted to.

(I'm in the process of setting up a private journal, where I can control access separately to every post. That's different: it'll be encrypted, unsearchable by anyone but me, and on servers totally under my control.)

Damn the torpedos search engines, full speed ahead!

A couple of weeks ago I switched anonymous comments back on, so that people who don't have LJ accounts can comment. Anonymous comments are screened, so after you post one it won't show up until I look at it and decide it isn't spam or flame-bait.

It's also worth noting that LJ accepts OpenID, so if you have a blog or a website somewhere else that groks the protocol, you can use that.

This post by elements (found by way of this post on fandom_flies) talks about "the user as citizen":

This issue of ownership is much bigger than Six Apart and Livejournal, because it's really about how we as a culture construct the new class of relationships between citizens and businesses that is embodied by the interactive, hyper-connected social nodes that form the new structures through which modern humans are organizing our public lives.

I'd like to propose that any business entity that is primarily driven by and dependent on an active and content-generating user base be obligated to assign some share of real and actualized decision-making power to democratically chosen representatives of that user base. Obviously I don't expect to see this spring into being in law overnight, or even perhaps at all, and I'm not sure that would even be appropriate. But I would like to see businesses encode this principle into their very structures in such a way that we the users - we the citizens of the social web - can count on a certain measure of rights and due process, beyond what we are legally owed by a corporate entity.

That's one possibility, and it's certainly worth pursuing, but I don't think it's likely to work. Let me propose a few others. I think they all have their place, and it's an open question which is going to work better:

• User-owned services: This is the tried and tested model of credit unions, mutual insurance companies, and co-ops. One user, one vote, and everybody owns an equal share. If LJ had gone this route, and had stuck with paid and invited members, we wouldn't be in this mess.
• User-owned servers: This uses the even more tried and tested principle of "A Person's Home is their Castle." What's on my server at home, under a domain name that I own, is a lot harder to take away. ISPs and phone companies are under much stricter rules about when they can deny you service than are corporations that own their own servers and kindly let you put your content on them. The nice thing about this option is that it scales well -- exactly like the Web, in fact. Search engines and cooperative tag servers take the place of centralized databases, and even searching and tagging can, and should, eventually be decentralized.
• Anonymous peer-to-peer: This is the Freenet model. Your content is encrypted, and widely replicated. Anyone with the document ID and key, which you can publish widely as well, can retrieve it and decrypt it. With wide, random distribution it becomes practically impossible to find and delete every copy of something (though it may become hard to find a copy for a while). Something like this has the potential to go a long way toward fixing the current problems with both censorship and overly-restrictive copyright.

Ultimately I think we're going to have all four: a push toward user representation on corporate-owned services, user-owned co-operative services, federated private servers, and anonymous peer-to-peer networks. I'm directing my own efforts toward federated private servers and anonymous peer-to-peer because they're the best fit for my cynical, old, anarchistic hacker's soul. (And, I might add, a pretty good fit with what some of my coworkers are doing, which hopefully will be published soon.)

But if someone else wants to write a Community Member's Bill of Rights I'll be happy to sign it, and if somebody wants to build a user-owned co-op community I'd be delighted to buy a share.

The New Adventures of Queen Victoria has a good comment on some of the latest LJ ugliness. (Also pointed to by filkertom; unfortunately the post has been deleted.) In that post, a simple gratuitous mention of H.censored P.censoredand c.censored p.censored drew an immediate snarky comment from an burrLJ employee86.

From which we conclude that LJ is scrutinizing every damned post for keywords. Not really surprising; so is Google, only for a different reason. LJ has also set themselves up as sole judge, jury, and executioner of what content is permitted by their Terms of Service. OK, they can do that: it's their site. I have a permanent account, so I can't send them much of a message by not sending them any more money. (Shakes fist at sky.)

This post by technoshaman has a little more to say about it, and tibicina draws our attention to the fandom_action community for discussion of legal issues and legal action around fandom. More on the recent journal deletions here and here.

technoshaman also points to an airline pilot's take on security. The stupidity isn't entirely confined to LJ.

Seen many places on my flist, here's a link to my 42^nd LJ post. My life in a nutshell, I guess. Can't speak for the universe.

So I see that permanent memberships are going on sale again -- for a week, starting Thursday. I've given them as gifts in the past, but I won't be doing it this year. I don't trust LJ anymore -- they're more concerned about looking good to investors than they are about their users' freedom of speech. (I was originally thinking of giving one as a graduation present, but I have since thought of something more personal, and arguably more useful.)

Like technoshaman says in this post, I'm looking forward to a day when we have a completely distributed blogosphere, where everyone controls their own content and it isn't tied to anyone else's server.

It's closer than you think.

In previous post I described the recent unpleasantness and suggested that I had the beginnings of an answer. This article gives a little more information, and notes that many are jumping ship to LJ clones like JournalFen and GreatestJournal. But I don't think that's the answer.

As I said before, we need to take back our content.

There are some details I haven't worked out -- I'd like to have a simple, complete out-of-the-box package, but all I have are pieces. Here are the basics, though, and a few tools to get you started:

You need a place on the web where you can host static web pages, preferably in a domain that you own and without anyone else's advertising. But your ISP will do to get started. You do not need to be able to run scripts or a database. If you have a DSL or cable connection you could even host it at home -- I think that's where we're heading, but we're not there yet.

You do that, if you want to, on your computer at home. A program like Blosxom or ikiwiki will let you format and organize your own web pages offline, and construct the RSS and HTML summary pages you need to make a proper blog. I'm working on a more geekish solution based on the Unix utility make. You don't really need either. Just make a subdirectory of your main web page called "blog", and make entries with paths like "/blog/2007/0530/2150.html" or maybe ".../2150/title.html".

In other words, every entry is either a web page or a directory (which lets you put any images the page uses together with the text). Now all you have to do is run a little script to generate the RSS and HTML summaries and upload any new pages to your public website using a program like rsync or a web-based version-control system like Subversion or git.

Now, here's the part that will require a little more hacking on my part: there needs to be a script that parses the page for tags, builds the tag indices, and cross-posts to LJ or some other blogging site -- or sites -- based on the tags. That way, you can use LJ as your comment aggregator. The other missing piece is the little script that screen-scrapes LJ's email comment notifications and puts them back into your working directory. (You could run your own comment CGI script, but it seems like a lot of hassle. I stole this idea from ohiblather, by the way -- she has multiple blogs elsewhere on the web, and posts pointers to them in her LJ, which is also where she directs most of the comments.)

That takes care of the mechanics of blogging. I like the way Blosxom and ikiwiki let you integrate blogs and comments seamlessly into a website that might have much more in it. There's no reason, for example, why you can't allow comments on every page, or make a "changeblog" out of your version-control changelog entries to point your readers to new or revised pages.

The next thing you need is a "friends" page. Probably the easiest thing to use for that is Planet, a simple feed aggregator that generates a web page. Check out their list of planet-powered sites. But you don't have to publish your friends page at all if you don't want to; you can keep it on your own computer at home. And you'd better not if it has private or friends-locked posts on it, like you might acquire by reading your LJ friends page.

The thing I really don't have a good handle on is the community-building aspect of LJ. The rest of the blogosphere does this using things like trackbacks, pings, and blogrolls. I suspect that the FOAF project may be a large part of the answer: you put a machine-readable profile on your home page, and let FOAF-aware search engines do the rest.

What I'm really advocating is a move away from centralized services controlled by faceless corporations, back to a world where everyone (oops! ETA: runs their own node in the peer-to-peer network that is the Internet. Remember that TCP/IP is a peer-to-peer protocol -- which machine is the client and which the server depends entirely on what they're doing at any given moment.)

Here are my current LJ stats, for what little they're worth:

Account type:	Permanent Account
Date created:	2002-06-08 16:52:29
Date updated:	2007-01-01 20:03:36, 3 hours ago
Journal entries:	2,066
Comments:	Posted: 4,554 - Received: 3,199

... only works if you have Javascript enabled. Yes, I'm reporting it as a bug. Only workarounds I can think of are to use a client or enable JS.

Update: 12-15 What breaks it is having JS turned off in a browser that normally supports it. Possibly also spoofing the user-agent in the headers.

Consider this, you're at the park and suddenly there's a zombie outbreak. You're surrounded. What do you do? Call 911? Yeah, like they'll believe you. Under normal circumstances, you'd probably be turned into a zombie by now, but luckily for you, you've got TxtLJ.

Just whip out your phone and text, "postcomm.zombiekillers Umm...help, zombies are attacking me at the park" to TxtLJ (89855).

That'll post your message to the zombiekillers and you'll be rescued in no time*.

*TxtLJ should not be relied on in a zombie attack.