Co-founder @dreamwidth / disabled dyke nerd / knows more about the internet than you do / blocks for bad vibes and fuckshittery
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May 27, 2023 • 22 tweets • 9 min read
A field guide to our cats, for new followers and those who might need a refresher from time to time! In order of acquisition:
Ginny: smartest cat I've ever been owned by, rules lawyer extraordinaire, hygiene police, can open locked cabinets by turning the key with her teeth, the cat my father has explained so much to she could pass her journeyman plumber's exam if she had thumbs
May 27, 2023 • 19 tweets • 4 min read
Surfacing this out of the thread from earlier because it's a perfect example of the problem I talk about with Trust and Safety all the time: I looked at that email and knew instantly what was going on. The reporters these people sent the emails to didn't.
When I pointed out exactly what was going on, down to pointing at the exact tactics being used, about half the responses I got were "that's such a convoluted idea, surely the simpler answer is right and you're making this up?"
May 26, 2023 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
Because I mentioned this in the replies to this tweet and people were dismissive: this screenshot has several telltales of fingerprinting techniques used to narrow down the identity of a leaker. The biggest giveaway is the irregular spacing after sentences (2 vs 3 spaces).
The stilted grammar and weird word choices in several places (but not everywhere) are likely also fingerprinting techniques. Fingerprinting is used to narrow down the identity of a leaker by dividing recipients into groups and sending slight variations to each group.
May 14, 2023 • 16 tweets • 3 min read
Surfacing this because I was just commenting on it: we all know Pepe is a far-right dog whistle at this point, but it's the use of "fren" here that's particularly telling.
"Fren" is a funny misspelling of "friend". It's also a dogwhistle backronym for "far right ethno nationalist". People will try to tell you that second point is false, that the backronym was made up and the original usage was innocuous.
May 13, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
The answer is precisely what Twitter used to repeatedly do: challenge the demand in court to draw out the process as long as possible.
The history of Erdogan challenging Twitter to remove things is a long, long, long one -- Elon fired everyone at Twitter who still knew it, of course, but Twitter has been blocked in Turkey for refusing to remove things before. But you don't even need to know that history.
May 13, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
All of this is precisely why I put a huge chunk of my time in February into providing a third party declaration in Netchoice v Bonta, the lawsuit over the CA version of this law. If anyone fighting Utah's needs one I will happily do the same.
These bills are terrible, they're unconstitutional, and they will place a severe undue burden on adults' speech, destroy the concept of privacy online, and lead to significant road blocks in accessing and disseminating information.
May 12, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I find it absolutely fucking baffling in the most hysterical way that we appear to have meaningfully shifted our spam account creation percentage downward by a permanent 5 points or so just by me amending our signup to tell people spam is against the ToS
Old wording: "I've read and agree to Dreamwidth's Terms of Service and Privacy Policy."
Apr 25, 2023 • 17 tweets • 3 min read
This article once again restates the thesis that my entire career has been built on: the dual cancer killing the concept of social media is venture capital and advertising. theverge.com/2023/4/18/2367…
It is perfectly possible to maintain a small, user-focused social media business without advertising, run entirely on user subscriptions. We are proof! You just can't do it and support the kind of growth that venture capitalists insist on.
The "people are a complex system" and "people are *incredibly* sensitive to vibes" points in particular are things that anyone who knows struggles DEEPLY to get across to people who don't understand how this shit works.
Apr 25, 2023 • 16 tweets • 2 min read
SPAAAAAAAM QUEUE. Account bio: "I am a research expert in the field of oral!" Me: oh, well, that's new at least, we don't usually get sex spammers -- oh, they mean they're spamming about oral hygeine
I was all excited for a minute and everything
Apr 25, 2023 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
This story is amazing. Yoel, honey, come sit over here with us at the "bitter old T&S people who have been fucked over by being Cassandra" table, my stories are not *quite* as bad as yours but I left LJ 17 years ago and still have to have anti-swat arrangements with local cops
That moment when you realize you've become the face of T&S enforcement to millions of people of varying levels of stability is utterly *terrifying*. I cannot begin to convey to people who have never had it happen how terrifying.
Apr 25, 2023 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
I see that Elon has discovered the rule of "always have a friend who spots opsec failures for a living scrutinize your screenshots and never take them from your live account" that any of us could have taught him if he asked us lol
Normal people do one of two things when they run a site:
A) Do all your official work from one account, leave the other for your personal use and never connect the two EVER
B) Stop using the site because you spend too much time on it and you hate it
Apr 24, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
<Shang Tsung voice> IT HAS BEGUN
Assembly station and assembler wondering why he can't find #207, plus bonus master diagram
1. Go to the Trending page and pick any trending topic. 2. In the top search bar, add "filter:blue_verified" to the end of the search query. 3. Click from "top" to "latest". Start blocking. Everyone there has paid for Blue.
Caution: if you are good at getting into the groove and have fast fingers, count how many accounts you block. Stop when you hit 200-225 accounts. Note the time. Wait at least 15 minutes before continuing.
Apr 22, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
weird failure mode for my ability to identify blank spam accounts by username alone: apparently it completely breaks on accounts created from China. I guess the standards for what a "real" person's username looks like are totally different there?
I wonder how long it will take the unconscious pattern matching routine in my wetware to upgrade its definitions
Mar 28, 2023 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
These are, as I suspected, death spiral statistics -- and I've spent two decades on this exact problem.
Not all of your most active users will ever subscribe: there's always going to be a subset who won't or can't. But if the bulk of your subscribers aren't extremely active users, you have a problem for two reasons:
Mar 7, 2023 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Every time I say this someone else goes "fucking wait, WHAT" so a reminder: it is a felony in all 50 US states to take Schedule II meds outside your house in anything but the pharmacy bottle with a current pharmacy label.
It is a felony in many but not all states to transport any lower scheduled drugs (and even nonscheduled drugs in some states) in anything but the pharmacy bottle with the pharmacy label.
Mar 7, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Aww, there are two foxes having an extensive conversation over on the golf course
The rich people playground is annoying to live next to because of all the fucking rich people, but the fact it's a massive wildlife habitat is nifty sometimes
Mar 7, 2023 • 13 tweets • 2 min read
also, thoracic vertebrae are cops
T3 is subluxated again and I can't do my former trick for getting it back into place since the lumbar fusion, grumble grumble whine
Mar 7, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
"I plan on going to jail for contempt of court for ignoring a valid court-ordered subpoena" is noble and all but I hope you've got a continuity plan for when the US government seizes your servers and confiscates your domain name
That article in general has me banging my head against the table. If you get a subpoena for user data, you comply or fight it in court. The available reasons for fighting it in court are extremely narrow, and the legal fees are intensely expensive.
Mar 5, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Lemme start off by saying that child labor is bad and we should stop it. Okay? Okay. That said: this article, and the entire conversation about child labor, misses the GIANT LOOPHOLE in child labor laws responsible for hundreds of thousands of times the number of working kids.
Which is to say: in all 50 states, child labor is completely legal with zero restrictions when it's a child working in their parent's own business or on their parent's farm. Those children are simply exempt from child labor laws.
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