Every friend I remove on LJ is another tie to the site I'm cutting free.

I spent the better part of the weekend dogsitting at my aunt's. Deacon is getting old, deaf, and incontinent, so it's best not to leave him alone for more than two hours.

He wakes up at 2am and barks needing to be let out. This ... did not do good things for my sleep schedule, given that I'd not remembered to bring the bare minimum of the pillows required for me to sleep comfortably.

There was a nasty twitter-account-compromise wandering around. The compromise was easy to spot amongst the people I read there, as very few of them would voluntarily tweet in support of a fad diet. I thought the first one might have been legit as I was expecting a scathing takedown of the latest fad diet, in fact, but unfortunately that was also a compromise.

On Sunday, I wound up with a migraine, so I was in excellent condition to meet my Infamous Cousin's new girlfriend (who works as a stripper). I wasn't having a good time actually locating my words, I was still half asleep, and fucking headaches. I did wind up discovering a fascinating item. In my search for the shower of a thousand tentacles, I found the Vado "Sculpture" tentacle shower, which she also approved of. (I think I like this one. Also the handcuff earrings.) And what hazing of the new girlfriend would be complete without sharing the Chocolate Penis Saga?

So I came home and basically slept for the remainder of Sunday and a good chunk of Monday, though I was awake to ask some salient questions in e-mail; there was less swearing than you'd think under the circumstances, although some of this was replaced by locutions such as "Also the previous query, [redacted], except louder, with a dance number and maracas."

I was in fact awake enough to go to a NaNo kickoff, which was fun. I recognized one of the people there on sight, not from previous NaNo stuff, and the shirt confirmed it. "Hello, co-worker!" I greeted him. There may be a sufficient number of $WORKPLACE folks doing NaNo to sort of club together.

Jennifer Christine Marie Elizabeth (fictional) spoke up at one point during all this, declaring that her name was in fact Lydia. GOOD TO KNOW. ... Oh god, she's got one of those alphabet names, doesn't she. Anna Bethany Christine Dagny Elizabeth Francine Gilda Heloise Isa Jennifer Kathryn Lydia Marie. Jesus christ that's a mouthful. Happily they ran out of steam halfway through. (It would have been Glinda had her mother not been too stoned on pain meds to remember how it was supposed to be spelled.) Poor Lydia.

The recent fad in "color blocking" makes me think of one thing, and I was fortunate enough to find a shirt illustrating this. I have plans for Wednesday.

I came home to find out that the promised changes to LiveJournal friends pages are in previewable state. I am so opposite of thrilled. I should really get around to RSSing-on-DW all the public journals I'd like to follow, and subscribing-to-notifications for the friends who post locked. Now that Carrie's clear, I just want to say that I hope the company reaps the benefits of its brilliant user research and customer service, and that the highest-up management gets to share in their full share of that result.

I've been jumping between a lot of emotions in the time I've been awake today. It's the 21st of December, so I should have the Solstice on my mind, but instead? LJ.

As near as I can tell from the publicly available information, the massive changes to the default comment display in R88 were not because backend demands required change, nor because looking at task abandonment rates were saying something scary (though I'd certainly be interested to know if either of those were the case; maybe that would make some of this headache go away -- though to be fair, the headache's been off and on since after getting sick last week) -- but because the new head of LJ didn't like the way the comments looked.

( Cut out of courtesy for those who need to avoid these discussions. )

I already changed my default icon on LJ after NaNo was over, so that's taken care of. I turned off autocrosspost when the new cache settings were shitting the bed and people were getting pages as displayed for other people. I set up the feed for my journal, so people over there will still be able to pick up the public entries if they care to. I don't know how much I'll crosspost after this. I've started to edit my old entries. There are a lot of them. I divested myself of maintainership in a few communities, left a few, and have started to remove friends.

I wish I could get everyone I care about out of there, but I figure at this point pretty much everyone who wants to come out either has left or is coming now.

LJ just had a release, and somewhere in the stuff that went on, some changes were made to LJ's login cookie such that LJLogin, the amazingly popular tool for, well, logging you in to LJ, broke.

(For those who are saying "Hey wait, why not log in using username and password like the rest of us?", you are probably not the target audience for LJLogin. The target audience is from what I gather mainly roleplayers, who can easily have dozens of accounts, any five or ten of which may be interacting with each other in comments, choosing a different icon for each comment, in near-real-time-IM speed. It's amazing what people can use LJ to do. The people who use LJ for this often have not just one but multiple paid accounts, because number of icons is very relevant to roleplayers.)

Deep in the comments of the most recent lj_releases entry, markf explained: "This is actually unrelated to the release, but we did make a minor change today in the way we handle cookies which has affected this plugin, and it will require the developer of the plugin to make some changes to it before it will work again. The changes made will make life significantly more difficult for automated spammers, and is something we intend to leave in place."

That, there, full stop, is why I am not going to start yelling about this. LJ has a spam problem. LJ has a major spam problem and I am pathetically grateful every time I see a report that there are changes that look to be effective in the fight. One of the major reasons I now prefer comments on Dreamwidth, and lock many entries on LiveJournal that are public elsewhere, is because of the spammers hiding in the cushions at LJ. Even knowing that this may cost LJ paying members, if this will address some of the spamming, I cannot fault them for rolling it out as fast as they could. (I do not know any of the other considerations, but faster is better when it comes to dealing with spammers.)

There is a completely hypothetical requirements-gathering session for an LJ-side login switcher. (I already checked and the previous (2010 and 2007) suggestions discussions on the topic were not helpful enough to be worth the trouble of linking there in my opinion.)

The LJLogin (Firefox) dev, slarti sounds plenty mad on the grounds that it sounds like LJ knew this would break LJLogin before it was rolled out but did not give notice, did not include the change in a numbered release so there was no mention in the release notes, made the change at the same time as a numbered release which made it less obvious to the external observer what was going on, and has not made the actual nature of the changes easy to track down. The dev of LJ Juggler (Chrome) also joins the thread.

I am sure it could have been handled more gracefully, but I'm still willing to extend LJ the benefit of the doubt and hope that the next time something comes up that will affect legitimate users using mostly a single third-party tool, that they take the time to notify the maintainer of that tool as a courtesy. (It is much easier for me to feel this placid generosity of spirit now that, in the words of james_nicoll "I do not personally have a squid in this fight".)

I hope things improve for everyone, except for the spammers. Those can go crawl off a cliff or something. I don't like spam.

1/4:
There was a lot of curry-making, in which somehow I made enough curry to feed a small army. I think I picked a rather large squash.

I escalated my Facebook activities to including gender as well as religion.

5:19 PM 1/5/2011
Had nice chat with Nora (norabombay, not anyone else who many of us might know named Nora; mentions of unlabeled Noras are usually her). Headset ran out before we were done talking. That was just Not On.

8:47 PM 1/5/2011
Back from headset exchange. I didn't have the outer box or the receipt, but I did have all the inner parts (including the pretty blue piece of plastic it rested on, complete with little bit of keep-it-there artificial snot); the helpful guy at the front desk sent me back to the electronics department to see if I could get another box to scan. The helpful guy in the electronics department did not have another box, but between the item, my memory, and his system, he was able to get the proper number so that the people up front could refund me.

So then I turned around and went back into electronics and got a headset that had more than two hours or so of talk time. This one is advertised to have 2 weeks standby, 10 hours talk. A bonus: it's also using a microUSB charger, just like my phone (and JD and Tif's, and I think Jed's as well). This means I can charge it off my phone charger, any microUSB cable I might happen to have around for phone charging, or a friend's charger, or that little charger gadget I try to keep in my purse nowadays. Compatible chargers are srs bzns.


1/6:
My aunt had discovered, in cleaning up and throwing out, a large fish-shaped pillow. She'd asked if I wanted it. I gladly accepted. It was not made by Mama, as my aunt had thought, but by Janlee Irving. I was not quite certain what I was going to use it for. Then, exor674 asked IRC to sit on her until she slept. I realized that this was perfect for trouting.

10:37 AM 1/6/2011
Out of context exchange is out of context:
[10:25] <Azz> THE SOLUTION IS CHAINS.
[context redacted]
[10:25] <mizzy> The solution according to you is always chains!
[10:26] <mizzy> Mind you, you're always right.

(So at some point or another, we discovered that Ev could access IRC. I think this was because Chatzy went down for a day or two, and I set up an emergency backup IRC chatroom. But I talked Ev through the process of connecting to IRC "the fun way" with just the Windows terminal, and once we confirmed that yes, she was getting in, that the crud on her machine wasn't blocking that port -- then she got a proper client set up. So there has been IRC fun with many of the chatfish. IRC, unlike Chatzy, does not try to time you out on purpose to keep idlers to a minimum, so there are a lot more people coming in and hanging around and making noise when more people come in.)

khasael updated people on what has been going on with mathsnerd (later updates: http://mathsnerd.dreamwidth.org/15283.html & http://khasael.livejournal.com/228172.html)


7:31 AM 1/7/2011
Finally finished the ramble on gender that I'd started on November 12. That one took a while. Multiplicity came up. http://azurelunatic.dreamwidth.org/6478632.html (locked)

When there are 403 unread messages in someone's email box, this causes a very specific and horribly scary moment of geek panic. I don't recommend it. Looking at your tab and seeing '403' resulted in a tizzy.

Mainstream social media types are finally getting around to the idea that filtering one's online content is a good plan in some circumstances. Filters are getting treated as groundbreaking, when LJ & its code descendants have had that for years upon years, and LJ users have evolved some very refined practices for dealing with same.

LiveJournal has entry-level security filters for one's own journal; comments to an entry are under the control of the entry owner, who can choose to screen comments from view, in addition to restricting the people who can see the entry to start with. The journal owner can set the entry to private, friends-only (and control who they list as friends), to one or more custom security groups, or to the public. (A token attempt at keeping kids out of smutty stuff can be made by setting an adult content setting, but there are ways for public stuff; if someone reports a public entry as too adult for the precious children to see, the Abuse team can flip the "this is adult content" switch on your entry, but locked entries don't have that sort of oversight.) Reading someone's entries on your friends page and allowing someone access to your friends-locked entries is bundled together in adding someone as a friend. The "Friend" status is not necessarily mutual, and someone adding you as a friend does not get them any more access to your stuff, just that they can see public stuff on their friends page.

The journal owner creates custom friends groups, and anyone who is made a member of this group has the ability to view anything that this group has been given access to, no matter when it was posted. While the ability to add single people to view an entry, one-off, or to say "all of these people except that guy" is desired, it does not exist on LiveJournal or any known code descendant.

LJ communities have the ability for people to decide whether they would like to join the community, and additional control from the community maintainers, who can allow anybody to join, allow anyone to ask to join (but review who asks before letting them in), or close the community so any new members must be invited by a maintainer. Community entry security is public or members-only, controlled by the person who has posted the entry. Watching and joining the community are separate.

Facebook lets you control access to any given status update, but general wall posts and some other things are apparently fairly lax in viewing permissions, so you'd better hope that your buddy doesn't post about the drunken night out where your high school students will see it. Security and reading are joined, and friendship is mutual.

Facebook's status update permissions are more granular than LJ's, with the ability to add single people, and exclude people. Pity the status update is so flippin' short. And that I loathe Facebook so completely.

Dreamwidth has similar security capabilities to LiveJournal. Subscription and access are separate. There's less pretense about age-based security: it's two levels of content warning, and there's no one enforcing that it get set on anything in particular. Communities have an administrators-only setting. Paid users can set up tag-based filtering for the reading page.

Twitter allows for accounts that are all public, or all locked. A friend must request access to one's locked account before one can grant it. There is no entry-level granularity, and no sub-grouping for security, though Twitter lists can be used to either expand one's reading list beyond the everyday, or pare down a noisy list to something manageable. You can also send individual direct messages to friends privately.

Most WordPress installations seem to be public, but apparently you can password-protect them.

I don't even know if you can make Tumblr locked.


I would like to see if DW can snatch some access-filter stuff from Facebook.


There was a small earthquake in my area. I check for earthquakes on Twitter, because they tend to make a lot of noise there. Plus there are things that tweet USGS data.

LJ has been listed by Spamhaus, which has likely got a decent amount to do with the notifications some people aren't getting. I propose a plan of action for users to help the Abuse Prevention Team squish as many spammerbots as humanly possible.

[Edit: Kareila rightly brought my attention back to the fact that this is a problem for the people who haven't been getting comments, and pointed at http://www.livejournal.com/tools/recent_comments.bml as a resource to check for comments in your journal, at least, even if you haven't been getting email notifications or inbox notifications.]

Someone in the news comments noticed that livejournal.com is currently listed on a Spamhaus blacklist.

LJ's IP is listed in the Spamhaus Blocking List because LJ is allowing Russian pharma spammers to abuse their service. Spamhaus is one of the most respected anti spam organizations in the world, and being listed there means they've ignored spammers on their network for quite a while and virtually no large ISP/email host wants their mail until they start acting like responsible Internet citizens.

http://www.spamhaus.org/Sbl/listings.lasso?isp=livejournal.com is the listing.

astragali, in the news post from 9th March 2011

The Spamhaus listing says:

SBL104433
208.93.0.128/32 livejournal.com
02-Mar-2011 08:29 GMT
livejournal.com: Again used by botnet spammers to host

My interpretation: Looking at the listing there, it seems to be that it's spammers hosting their warez on LJ, rather than other forms of bad behavior (like spammers spoofing email claiming to come from livejournal.com, or people reporting news post notifications as spam rather than retrieving/resetting their account info and unsubscribing). So if that is correct, then LJ would want to track down the spammers who have set up little nests on LJ, and root them out and destroy them.

Some of the spammers that are on LJ don't serial-add, don't spam communities, and don't comment, they just sit around in their own journals making spammy posts (and apparently emailing people to point them to those spammy posts). There are a lot of them.

As a user, I can't take action directly against them. But I can report spam in my own journal and in my comms. I can hang out on the Latest Posts page (http://www.livejournal.com/stats/latest.bml) and use the Report a Bot form (in the contextual hover menu, or at http://www.livejournal.com/abuse/bots.bml) to get more of the bots reported to the Abuse Prevention Team.

I don't know how many hours the team has had to devote to spamwhacking, but I know I can spare five or ten minutes to report some of the bots on that page. The more we report, accurately, the more they can zap. The more we report, the more information on the bots (the IP addresses they use, the email addresses, the email domains, the other patterns) they have to analyze.

I've spent nearly ten years on LJ, through all sorts of ups and downs. Spamhaus blacklisting LJ means it's serious. We've had our differences, but I want to keep LJ around, for myself and for my friends who have made their homes here. I can spare five or ten minutes reporting bots. Who's with me?

These are some of the things that I had been working on, but have now decided that actually I'm not interested in writing the whole thing. Therefore, I'm putting them out here as an exercise in both decluttering (getting my draft file down to something reasonable) and procrastination (not writing what I should be writing), and getting things out of my brain so other things can go in. I am putting them out in public because I am not Denys Nye, and because apparently other people do like to see what goes on in my head.

There are sure to be more later.

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LJ and the Walled Garden Effect
( Read more... )

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An Observation on Developing Live Things (DW vs. LJ)

( Read more... )

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r69 revisited (this was in between when the outrage started and when the ability to easily crosslink locked stuff went away; this is no longer current at all, and is included as a historical curiosity about my thoughts at the time)
( Read more... )

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(Facebook, privacy) An inch is not a mile.

( Read more... )

LJ has released r69, which involves Facebook Connect, OpenID and Facebook Connect accounts being upgradable to full accounts, opt-in cross-posts to Facebook and/or Twitter for any/every entry and comment you make (controllable at creation time, unchecked by default for locked stuff), and pingbacks.

I have provided extensive commentary.