elisi | Oh joy... :(

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Crossposts: http://elisi.livejournal.com/1033161.html

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Oh joy... :(

Originally posted by

rahirah at CONFIRMED: LJ Servers moving to Russia, now with all kinds of links and shit

LJ has been owned by a Russian company, SUP, for some years, but until recently, the servers were in California, and thus subject to US law. This is no longer be the case. Links on the ramifications of this (English speakers will need to use Google Translate on the last two):

http://madfilkentist.dreamwidth.org/77455.html
https://mdlbear.dreamwidth.org/1584905.html
http://siderea.livejournal.com/1330106.html
http://lynnenne.livejournal.com/285076.html
http://dolboeb.livejournal.com/3079690.html
http://dolboeb.livejournal.com/3081385.html

I have done a traceroute ( http://ping.eu/traceroute/ ) on my own LJ, and it appears to come through a Russian server now.

There are unconfirmed reports that journals with 'objectionable' content, such as pro-Ukraine blogs, are being deleted. There's also what looks like a mass migration of Russian users into Dreamwidth over the last week or so.

There are all kinds of ramifications for this move, most of them bad. For people located outside Russia, I think the greatest risk is simply that SUP has decided that the non-Russian side of LJ hasn't been profitable in ages, and is never going to be profitable, and this is the first step in shutting it down entirely. So if you have a Livejournal with content that you'd like to preserve, now is a real good time to back it up.

HOW TO BACK UP YOUR LJ:

https://www.dreamwidth.org/support/faqbrowse?faqid=127 (importing personal blogs)
https://www.dreamwidth.org/support/faqbrowse?faqid=230 (importing communities)

You can import tags, icons, filters, posts, and comments – the whole shebang. You can also set up crossposting to Livejournal (I've been crossposting to LJ from DW for years.)

If you have no Dreamwidth account, if someone imports a comment you made, it will be made under your Open ID account. If you make a DW account, you can claim these comments:

http://www.dreamwidth.org/support/faqbrowse?faqid=84 (How can I claim my OpenID account with my Dreamwidth account?)

If you're already on Dreamwidth, or is you're setting up a backup account there now, please let me know so I can friend you over there. I'd hate to lose track of everyone if we wake up one morning and find a big ol' 404 error where LJ used to be.

~~

What

rahirah said: Please let me know who you are on Dreamwidth. (I'm elisi everywhere, except Tumblr.) (But Tumblr is not important...) ETA: I'm not going anywhere, and I don't particularly *like* DW, it's just... Not home. (And does not have a single layout that I like.) However, I like to have back-up plans. Let's all move to InsaneJournal!! :D (Tweak says, "i love you")

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Oi vey.

Under normal circumstances I'd say that the practical implications of this for anybody who isn't Russian are probably negligible. But after this year, who even knows anymore. I doubt the Clinton campaign thought they needed to censor their discussions about pizza, and look how that ended up . . .

Back when I moved, I made a series of resource posts about Dreamwidth. They're four years old, so I won't vouch for all the links anymore, but there's still a lot of info that I think people would find useful:

Some basics: https://promethia-tenk.dreamwidth.org/27704.html
Mirroring and cross-posting: https://promethia-tenk.dreamwidth.org/28284.html
A tip about font sizes to make things look better: https://promethia-tenk.dreamwidth.org/28555.html
How to fill out your reading list: https://promethia-tenk.dreamwidth.org/31350.html

ETA: every time LJ has one of its ~episodes, I fall down the biggest rabbit hole of friends-of friends-of friends-of friends: reading everybody's posts and comments. It combines two of my very favorite things: fandom, and technology platform wars. Figure out a way to fit typology in there too and I'd probably never come up for air.

Edited 2016-12-31 03:44 (UTC)

We're already friends here, as you can see.

It combines two of my very favorite things: fandom, and technology platform wars. Figure out a way to fit typology in there too and I'd probably never come up for air.
The joy of being an INTP... You could type everyone based on their response?

Thank you for the links btw. And I'm still unsure what exactly to DO.

The joy of being an INTP... You could type everyone based on their response?
I try to do that, though pretty much everybody left reacting to these things are all of the 'but I don't wanna change!' persuasion, which makes things a bit tricky?

On the other hand, LJ users have been on the cutting edge of having to worry about the Russians for years now! Think of all those people out IRL who are just now catching up!

Thank you for the links btw. And I'm still unsure what exactly to DO.
I think you're in a good position, frankly? You've got a lot of flexibility and if you decide you need to start pulling away from LJ you don't need to make any changes all at once. You're backed up, you've got cross-posting worked out, and you have several charming and attractive DW-based friends *g*

I agree with the people who say that the damage is essentially already done: they already have your data and there's no getting it back, so panicking and pulling up roots isn't going to get anyone any advantages. The thing to do now is just get your journal backed up and then decide how much money, data, and legitimacy you want to give LJ going forward.

I . . .uhh . . . may have gotten up early to write a post. I'm working today, but people need to know how to optimize their technology experience! They must be helped right now!

I try to do that, though pretty much everybody left reacting to these things are all of the 'but I don't wanna change!' persuasion, which makes things a bit tricky?
Very true. Js all around... ;)

On the other hand, LJ users have been on the cutting edge of having to worry about the Russians for years now! Think of all those people out IRL who are just now catching up!
Mmmm. Yeah. Like I said elsewhere, Obama has been... a reprieve? I was watching an interview with George Michael which must have been from the very early 2000s and he was raging about Bush & Blair, and it feels like lifetimes away? Except it really wasn't. Guess people got complacent.

I think you're in a good position, frankly?
Oh yes. Hence mostly spreading information. (And they'll have all the info anyway, and could probably hack anyone they wanted...) I've also looked up LJ Book (where you downloaded your LJ and turned it into a word document), but it's now changed to something called BlogBooker and costs money. But it might be an idea. In case something eats the whole internet.

I . . .uhh . . . may have gotten up early to write a post. I'm working today, but people need to know how to optimize their technology experience! They must be helped right now!
Bless you. *squish*

Good. :)

PS. I got Owls to watch Dirk Gently. He's halfway through! (And confused.) :D

You should have just said 'Douglas Adams.' That would have worked.

I'll give it a shot later.

Oh, I didn't know you weren't aware! Sorry, I presumed you knew.

And it's not like it's urgent, but I can't think of a better show to make you forget all the current woes. We mainlined it in like a week (which is very quick for us, considering we watched it as a family).

Mmmm. Yeah. Like I said elsewhere, Obama has been... a reprieve? I was watching an interview with George Michael which must have been from the very early 2000s and he was raging about Bush & Blair, and it feels like lifetimes away? Except it really wasn't. Guess people got complacent.
I don't know how it goes in Britain, but over here it's a pretty reliable truism that the presidency will go back to the other party every eight years. There are some exceptions (Reagan ---> Bush I), but they tend to be limited. It makes these things somewhat easier to deal with if you're able to keep it in mind.

Oh yes. Hence mostly spreading information. (And they'll have all the info anyway, and could probably hack anyone they wanted...)
Thinking over this is a bit more, and I think the big issues, if you are not Russian, are:

1) Principle: this is certainly a user-hostile move in general and a deeply threatening move for LJ users who are Russian, and do you want to support a company that does these things?

2) Sensible paranoia about the breadth and ambitions of Russia's hacking programs? I'm not saying Russia is out to get any random non-Russian personally, but 2016 has certainly proven that Russia should be taken seriously has a cyber threat.

3) General internet security: I think the disappearance of https worries me more than the location of the servers, frankly. I don't make a general habit of noting which sites do or don't have https running unless I'm doing a sign-in, paying for something, or otherwise inputing sensitive information, but I've been spot checking a bunch of different sites I use right now, and it's not like having https is some universal standard on every page of all respectable websites, but I think it's something one might reasonably hope to see if you're going to be providing information beyond just what you're clicking on? (A sampling: Tumblr, has https. New York Times, no, at least on the home page. Washington Post, yes. My RSS reader, which I access through a website, no. You Tube, yes. Gmail, yes. All Google properties in general, it looks like.) Dreamwidth seems to be a bit spotty? Which is weird to me. Most of the pages are secure, but random posts seem not to be. This one is not right now, for instance, but many other entries are . . . *clicks around some more*

Interesting . . . it looks like the https on Dreamwidth is somehow session based? Everything I access from my reading page is secure. Things I access from other places, including being linked from outside and from email notification are not, including locked posts. I'll have to go find some explanation about this somewhere. I did a search for 'https' and 'ssl' in the Dreamwidth help and faq and didn't get anything. Maybe in one of the news posts *goes to look*

Ok, yes. From January 2015:

We've had multiple people asking us why it's not possible to browse the entire site in SSL. The answer is very convoluted, but it involves the fact that user-generated content loading data from all over the internet is very, very hard to serve via SSL without problems. (If you serve secure and non-secure content on the same page, browsers complain a lot, and sometimes refuse to load at all.)

[staff profile] mark and [staff profile] fu have been working really hard to fix a lot of those questions, though. We have a lot of code in this release to make it possible for you to browse the site via HTTPS. We're not turning it on as a default everywhere yet, because there are inevitably a ton of bugs, but you can now manually request things from https://www.dreamwidth.org and get it that way. (In fact, please do; it will help with testing.)

Once we're satisfied that it works, we'll be releasing it more widely to everyone.

And then from June 2015:

If you run a browser extension that automatically switches you to the secure (HTTPS) version of a website, you may have already noticed this, but the past six months we've been concentrating development effort on making Dreamwidth work via secure connection. We're getting closer and closer to being able to declare our HTTPS/SSL support 'done': at this point, it's down to just the last bugfixes and edge cases. (And there are a lot of bugfixes and edge cases, don't get me wrong -- the project was a lot bigger than you might think.)

What this means for you right now: if you have one of those extensions that automatically switches you to the HTTPS version of a website (such as HTTPS Everywhere), things should Just Work. If you don't have that extension, you can manually change links from (for instance) http://www.dreamwidth.org to https://www.dreamwidth.org, and once you do that, most internal site links should remain on the HTTPS end of things. (And if they don't, it's a bug and you should report it!)

Please do continue to let us know if you run into any problems while using the secure version of the site. We're pretty close to being ready to declare it fully ready for prime time.

Unfortunately no news after that, but it does look like I can boot any Dreamwidth page I want into https. Also I may go looking for one of those extensions they're talking about.

Anyway, my point is, LiveJournal removing https if it had it before is certainly a regressive and user-hostile move that makes your data less secure to the internet as a whole. And in this time of massive data breaches and hacks, is really not the direction we should all be moving in. /end ramble

But it might be an idea. In case something eats the whole internet.
You never know. Though personally I'd think it more likely that the internet eats us, but I'm not ruling anything out after this year.

I just nabbed Steven Universe on sale from Amazon the other day, so I'm rewatching that right now, but I'll try to have a look later.

Ti is impressive.

On my tablet ATM, so longer reply forthcoming, but c&p'd this from Kita (re whether we should support LJ):

'The most interesting (and possibly compelling) bit of info- apparently, in Russia LJ IS blogging. It's THE place for not only community/conversation, but also for working toward social and political change. Basically, it's a free speech oasis in the middle of a wanna-be-fascist wasteland. Our dollars help support that revolution.'

I have watched... The first four episodes? And a handful of others.

Enjoy. :)

Actually right now am technically watching the Mummer's Parade (http://phl17.com/live/). Which is kind of like Carnivale, but in Philadelphia, at New Years, with 100% more banjos and cross-dressing.

Ti is impressive.
*curtsies* I enjoy it, anyway.

'The most interesting (and possibly compelling) bit of info- apparently, in Russia LJ IS blogging. It's THE place for not only community/conversation, but also for working toward social and political change. Basically, it's a free speech oasis in the middle of a wanna-be-fascist wasteland. Our dollars help support that revolution.'
It's a good point. I'll be very interested to hear updates of rumors about Russian LJers being shut down, and Russians moving to DW.

Update: just installed HTTPS Everywhere. It works!

All the love for the EFF <3

Ooooh, shiny.

Did you ever write a public post? Or are you planning to? Then I can just link people. :)

Nice!!!

Right here: https://promethia-tenk.dreamwidth.org/33951.html

Though I'm editing it right now to clean it up a bit and add a few more resources.

I need a tech geek icon . . .

That looks very thorough. Although I think you messed up a link in Stage Three...

Owls and I are basically liveblogging it here: https://owlboy.dreamwidth.org/1856880.html?thread=10707312#cmt10707312

... Sounds mental.

Oooof, looks like all of my links are messed up? *goes to investigate*

Might only be the one, but it'd throw all the others off.

And I was also thinking of all the HTTPS stuff. Although that probably fits better in another post. (I can do one myself. But you are undoubtedly more of an expert.)

I can't find it! cries Everything looks fine. I even compared my html to old posts that are working, and it all looks exactly the same. kicks things

I might put up some thoughts about the https, and maybe some other internet hygiene stuff. I'm far from expert, but you pick things up.

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Oh joy... :(

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