jducoeur: (Default)

...

Having heard the rumblings of the latest controversy, I just wandered over to LJ, and was presented by the Gigantic Wall of Text in the Little Tiny Box that is the new Terms of Service. Some offhand thoughts:

First and most importantly -- the TOS refers a couple of times to "Article 10.2 of the Federal Act of the Russian Federation No. 149", which is a bit mysterious, so I did a little digging and found this translation of the Act in question. Note that Article 10.2 is not the same thing as subsection 2 of Article 10 -- keep scrolling further down. The following is my personal read of this stuff, but please bear in mind that IAverymuchNAL.

In general, this stuff is only officially relevant if you have 3000 user views in a 24 hour span, at which point you are officially a "Blogger". I suspect most of us have never crossed that line, but it's unpleasantly arbitrary.

If you do cross that line, it basically says that you are going to get put on A List in the official Russian government. More importantly, you are legally liable for your words under Russian law, and while I don't know the extent of that, I would bet that the freedom of speech protections are a heck of a lot less useful than those in the US.

Granted, I don't know how relevant it is to the average American citizen if they get indicted in Russia. But under the circumstances, I'm less than comfortable rolling those dice.

Based on sections 8.3 of the TOS, I believe the same is true for any community that passes 3000 views in a single day, which I suspect is rather more common, and that the Community Moderators are liable for what gets posted in the community. ("Community Owner shall be responsible for the Community, including the Community rules, the Content posted within the Community, the actions of Community Supervisor and Moderator.") IMO, the upshot there is that communities should get the hell out of dodge.

It is bloody damned weird that the English TOS you are signing is officially unofficial -- you're actually agreeing to the Russian text, and the document says quite plainly that the English translation is not legally binding.

Section 9.2.6 ("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") seems to likely outlaw DW's backup-your-LJ feature, so I'd recommend doing it sooner rather than later if you haven't already.

It's worth noting that nothing in the TOS itself is obviously malign or ill-intentioned: far as I can tell, it's a fairly ordinary TOS that is somewhat twisted by the implications of the Russian legal code. But it does drive home that LJ is now a Russian service, governed by Russian rules, which are pretty hostile to anything that might be considered a threat to public order by the Kremlin.

Personally, I think I'm going to agree to the new rules, but I may stop cross-posting there after this, and limit myself to reading the few folks I care about who haven't jumped over to here. (Now I just need to figure out how to cross-post this stuff to Facebook without having LJ in the middle -- time to look into the current relationship of FB and RSS feeds...)

jducoeur: (device)
I suspect that many of my friends have heard about this by now, but for those who haven't:

The tl;dr is that the Sword of Damocles that has been hanging over LJ for several years is starting to cut. LiveJournal has been owned by a Russian company for some time now; evidence says that they recently moved the servers to Russia. That almost certainly means that the Russian government is going to begin actively listening to everything posted here (if they weren't already); knowing them, it is *extremely* likely that this monitoring will not in any way respect your privacy settings. On top of that, there are indications (not yet confirmed that I've heard) that they've begun actively censoring accounts critical of the Russian government.

[livejournal.com profile] siderea has made several recent posts about this; for more details, see this entry, and this one.

The upshot is that a *lot* of people are finally bailing from LiveJournal to DreamWidth, with various degrees of prejudice ranging from "doing primary posting on DW from here on out" to "deleting all traces of my LJ history". This is *not* paranoid: odds are good that the Russian spooks are going to read not just your new stuff but your history of private posts, so if that matters, you may want to take steps.

(For those who haven't come across it: DreamWidth is essentially an alternate LiveJournal -- one of many, but the best of the lot. It was originally based on the same code, although LJ and DW have begun to go their separate ways over the years. As far as I can tell, it's a deeply wholesome project: open-source, non-profit, non-commercial, supported entirely by memberships. While I don't use it much yet, I've been a paid member there for a long time -- they're good folks.)

Anyway: personally, I'm a bit less het-up about the change -- I've always been cynical about online security, and have been assuming for some years now that LJ was at best marginally more secure than Facebook (that is, not), so I generally don't post sensitive material. And I've been expecting this particular twist for some time now. I haven't decided whether to make the leap to DW-primary yet, although I might do so depending on how things progress.  Don't be surprised if this account becomes secondary, copied from the DW one.

So, putting that together: if you're an LJ user, and don't have one already, I recommend getting a DreamWidth account. If you care about your LJ history, seriously consider backing it up to DW. And if you haven't already friended me over there, I encourage you to do so. (Same account name, as usual.)

LJArchive

Jan. 7th, 2009 12:39 pm
jducoeur: (Default)
Thanks to [livejournal.com profile] tpau for pointing out the layoffs at LiveJournal. If this article is to be believed, it's probably not the end of the world -- everybody's laying off right now, and I can't say I'm entirely astonished that LJ is consolidating. But it's a good reminder that backing up one's journal is a good idea, just in case.

Thanks also to her for the pointer to ljArchive, a tool for doing exactly that. It's not a panacea -- it's .NET-based, so mainly intended for Windows, and I gather from its LJ community that some users have had reliability issues with it. But I found it quite nice: easy to install, easy to use, and quick. It took just a few minutes to get it up and running, and just a few more to download my entire journal (about 1800 entries and 14000 comments, so that's nicely efficient). It's open-source freeware, and even comes with a reasonably good viewer for reading and searching your journal. In fact, the search functionality is so fast that it may be the easiest way to look up old entries.

So I'd strongly recommend to Windows users that, if you don't already have a solution in place, it's worth downloading ljArchive and backing up your journal. I put the odds of LJ collapsing fairly low still, but it's always better to be prepared...

LJArchive

Jan. 7th, 2009 12:39 pm
jducoeur: (Default)
Thanks to [livejournal.com profile] tpau for pointing out the layoffs at LiveJournal. If this article is to be believed, it's probably not the end of the world -- everybody's laying off right now, and I can't say I'm entirely astonished that LJ is consolidating. But it's a good reminder that backing up one's journal is a good idea, just in case.

Thanks also to her for the pointer to ljArchive, a tool for doing exactly that. It's not a panacea -- it's .NET-based, so mainly intended for Windows, and I gather from its LJ community that some users have had reliability issues with it. But I found it quite nice: easy to install, easy to use, and quick. It took just a few minutes to get it up and running, and just a few more to download my entire journal (about 1800 entries and 14000 comments, so that's nicely efficient). It's open-source freeware, and even comes with a reasonably good viewer for reading and searching your journal. In fact, the search functionality is so fast that it may be the easiest way to look up old entries.

So I'd strongly recommend to Windows users that, if you don't already have a solution in place, it's worth downloading ljArchive and backing up your journal. I put the odds of LJ collapsing fairly low still, but it's always better to be prepared...
jducoeur: (Default)
Technical question for those who know LJ better than I: is there an appropriate way for outside programs to get at your communities? There are well-established pages for fetching flists and interests, but I'm not finding anything comparable for communities. This is stuff I'd like to pull into CommYou -- you should be able to hold a conversation "in" one of your communities -- but I'm not finding a way to fetch the list short of scraping your profile page...

ETA: Okay, found it. What I need is to add the "comm=1" flag to the fdata.bml call. This is documented, but not on the page where I had originally been looking...
jducoeur: (Default)
Technical question for those who know LJ better than I: is there an appropriate way for outside programs to get at your communities? There are well-established pages for fetching flists and interests, but I'm not finding anything comparable for communities. This is stuff I'd like to pull into CommYou -- you should be able to hold a conversation "in" one of your communities -- but I'm not finding a way to fetch the list short of scraping your profile page...

ETA: Okay, found it. What I need is to add the "comm=1" flag to the fdata.bml call. This is documented, but not on the page where I had originally been looking...

FRNK Radio

Sep. 1st, 2006 01:35 pm
jducoeur: (Default)
Since I suspect most people don't read [livejournal.com profile] lj_releases, a brief PSA:

LJ has added a new feature, called FRNK Radio. It's essentially a constant audio webcast, made up of the most recent public voiceposts made to LJ. (Presumably a random selection of them.) Kind of interesting, although I'm not sure it's something I would choose to listen to. Regardless, though, be aware that, if you make public voiceposts, they may wind up in this stream at some point.

(I don't see any obvious way to count yourself out from this feature, although I suspect that there will be some demand for an option to do so...)

FRNK Radio

Sep. 1st, 2006 01:35 pm
jducoeur: (Default)
Since I suspect most people don't read [livejournal.com profile] lj_releases, a brief PSA:

LJ has added a new feature, called FRNK Radio. It's essentially a constant audio webcast, made up of the most recent public voiceposts made to LJ. (Presumably a random selection of them.) Kind of interesting, although I'm not sure it's something I would choose to listen to. Regardless, though, be aware that, if you make public voiceposts, they may wind up in this stream at some point.

(I don't see any obvious way to count yourself out from this feature, although I suspect that there will be some demand for an option to do so...)

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