I preferred LJ to Facebook and Twitter too. Mostly for the fact that it predates Facebook and twitter.
(But I liked LJ for the blog aspect of it.)
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Yeah, I know who he is. If people had used his last name instead of just saying “George,” I wouldn’t have had to ask.
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Yeah, that would be a terrible thing to leave behind on your LiveJournal page when you leave the service.
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So how much of it is policy and how much of it is legally-required small print?
I have used several American products & services that included small print that essentially said that I wasn’t allowed to do business with Iranian or Cuban nationals, or that I was somehow prohibited from reselling my (American-made) property to those countries.
Most of the time, they just put those things there to be “on the safe side”, not because they cared or because they were going to enforce it. So that was no reason to boycott American products.
The safe harbour agreement was never worth the paper it was printed on; the European Court of Justice invalidated it in October 2015 because it did not provide adequate protection and thus violated European citizen’s right to privacy. A new, slightly improved agreement titled “Privacy Shield” was negotiated with the Obama administration last summer. Everyone was having doubts about it; I guess it’s about worth the paper it is printed on, but not if there are more than a handful of printed copies. On privacy matters, we trusted the Obama Administration about as far as we could throw them, but of course there are business interests behind allowing free transatlantic data transfers. Privacy activists are still firmly against it.
I’m not sure Trump has said anything, but he signed an executive order reducing non-citizen’s privacy rights, which some relevant people in Europe have interpreted as an outright breach of the Privacy Shield treaty; the current official position, however, is that the specific privacy rights that Trump’s order concerns were never part of the Privacy Shield Treaty. (Trump and the EU-US privacy shield laws | TechCrunch)
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Putin’s Russia is the current global leader in exporting fascism, inheriting all the state control apparatus of the USSR with none of the utopian ideals. I wish people wouldn’t go to the strawman of ‘war with Russia’, but just observe what Putin’s values are and what he is doing. There is no common ground that can be sought with a petrostate bent on oppression of religious and civil rights, military interference in other countries, environmental exploitation, robber-baron economics, built on the back of blatantly rigged elections and state control of the media. There’s only containment of Putin’s attempts to expand his influence, and waiting for him to die or retire so a non-fascist can take over.
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Dreamwidth has an automated import for basically the full archive. It can be a bit slow, but I just did it and it worked perfectly as far as I can tell. All entries, tags and comments.
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It was the two non-fascists, Gorbachyev and Yel’tsin, that paved the way for Putin as Russia imploded. Pushkin said the history of Russia is “Voina y mor” - war and pestilence, and Tolstoy’s version, “Voina y mir” - War and Peace - has turned out far from prophetic.
Russia has been a nightmare to govern for a very long time. It’s too big, too diverse, too undeveloped. American wishful thinking that all it needed was a bit of free market and some non-rigged elections was a recipe for disaster. When it comes to Putin I suspect a lot of Russians unconsciously cite Belloc - be sure to keep a hold of Nurse for fear of finding something worse.
Edit - when it comes to exporting fascism by unintended consequences, I think there’s another country which has been far more successful.
LiveJournal just got a wild DMCA smack from the 9th Circuit Court. Will they feel that in Russia?
The case involves LiveJournal, a social media platform that allows users to create “communities” based on a common theme or subject. The communities are partly managed by moderators, who review posts (including photos) that users submit to make sure they follow the rules for posting and commenting created by the community. A community focused on celebrity news, called “Oh No They Didn’t” (ONTD), became particularly popular, garnering millions of views every month.
Enter Mavrix Photography, a photo agency that specialized in celebrities. Mavrix discovered that several of its celebrity photos had been posted on ONTD between 2010 and 2014. Rather than sending a DMCA takedown notice, Mavrix went straight to court to sue for copyright infringement. LiveJournal took the posts down immediately, and invoked the DMCA safe harbors, asserting that it was simply “hosting content at the direction of a user.” The district court agreed.
The Ninth Circuit took another view, based in large part on LiveJournal’s reliance on moderators to review and delete content. Those moderators, the court said, (1) might be LiveJournal’s agents; and, as such, (2) might have played such an active role in shaping the content of the ONTD community that content hosted on LiveJournal was not “at the direction of the user” (as required by the DMCA) but rather “at the direction of LiveJournal;” and (3) might have acquired actual or “red flag” knowledge of infringement that could be attributed to LiveJournal. So the court sent the case back to district court to let a jury figure it out—a very expensive proposition.
I hope that one gets reversed!
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What B.S.
At the end of the day it’s their website and the people who visit are guests.
It’s the way of the web. Hell, make a comment about some SWJ B.S. here on boingboing and you might suck up a ban.
People who own the site can make any rules they wish to apply to their web site.
It’s your choice to visit or not.
An accurate description of the rest of your comment.
Behaviour which has been accepted and even encouraged over the last 18 years at LiveJournal is now forbidden, because Putin wills it.
There is a huge difference between banning anti-progressive trollies and banning support groups for LGBT youths because they promote homosexuality to minors.
Hence the exodus to Dreamwidth and sharing of LJ export tools.
It’s almost like you never read the article.
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Didn’t hardliners also remove Kruschev? Soviet Russia had many moderates, but now their country is in the hands of a narcissistic madman.
What part of “it’s their website” do you fail to understand?
Do I feel it’s right?
No.
Do I understand that it’s their website and they are free to do as they wish with their site?
Yes
In a world where a dyspeptic man-child was elected President…
Where Congress has failed to stop the tyrant from issuing blatantly unconstitutional Executive Order after Executive Order…
One Circuit Court Judge has taken judicial activism to a whole new level, fighting evil from the bench by day, and kicking its ass by night.
She is…
#The Social Warrior Justice.
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What part of “exodus” do you fail to understand?
We are leaving LJ and letting them know exactly why.
You are right, they can do what they like. They can also suffer the consequences of pissing off their long term userbase (I’ve been there since it was invitation only).
LJ should have become a members co-operative back in 2005, then we could have avoided being taken over by Putin.
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I was wondering about that too … there’s no mention in the TOS about this … just another hate-russia-day ?
Why is anti-LBGQT policies acceptable and excusable? It has nothing to do with “hating” Russia, and everything to do with expressing opposition to particular policies which are dangerous to people’s physical well-being.
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Sure there is. It’s just not worded as such.
By posting Content, User shall:
[…]
Mark Content estimated by Russian legislation as inappropriate for children (0 −18) as “adult material” by using Service functions.
They’re referring to this law:
Article 1 of the bill amended On Protecting Children from Information Harmful to Their Health and Development with a provision classifying “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relationships” as a class of materials that must not be distributed among minors. The term is defined as materials that are “[aimed] at causing minors to form non-traditional sexual predispositions, notions of attractiveness of non-traditional sexual relationships, distorted ideas about the equal social value of traditional and non-traditional sexual relationships, or imposing information about non-traditional sexual relationships which raises interest in such relationships insofar as these acts do not amount to a criminal offence.” Article 2 makes similar amendments to “On basic guarantees for the rights of the child in the Russian Federation”, commanding the government to protect children from such material.
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It just says you have to mark the content unappopiate for children, it does not ban such content . NSFW adult material is also to be marked as such, it’s not like that is going to stup teenagers to get access to it . This is just a lot of noise about nothing… who even knew livejournal still existed …
How are existence of LBGQT people “inappropriate” for children?
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