D.O.P.-T.

Sep. 3rd, 2025 11:49 pm
weofodthignen: selfportrait with Rune the cat (Default)
[personal profile] weofodthignen
The street tree that got chopped up when they put in the driveway for the new house in the neighbourhood has been replaced with a slightly different kind of sapling. Tagged that it needs to be moved 1 foot to the side. I saw 2 workmen puzzling over it today. Hopefully it'll survive.

D.O.P.-T.

Sep. 2nd, 2025 08:54 pm
weofodthignen: selfportrait with Rune the cat (Default)
[personal profile] weofodthignen
Started a new sack of dog kibble today, which reminded me. Every time we go to Petco I marvel at the new dog toys. The shocker this time was a giant plush tick.

D.O.P.-T.

Sep. 1st, 2025 09:31 pm
weofodthignen: selfportrait with Rune the cat (Default)
[personal profile] weofodthignen
It was a little cooler. Monty materialised in the back garden, so I fed him.

I toted home a minimal exercise bike that someone had left at the kerb. That was a workout in itself.

Proton AI (LLM)

Sep. 1st, 2025 08:48 am
arlie: (Default)
[personal profile] arlie
This morning I received an official email from Proton, announcing that they'd released a privacy-conscious AI. They presumably mean a large language model (LLM) chatbot. It's available only via apps, which they've only produced for iOS and Android - not Windows, MacOS, and Linux. There's a free version, and a for-pay upgrade. It's apparently being discussed, semi-officially, on X and Reddit - so that's where to share any feedback. (I don't have accounts on either one.)

I'd much prefer they put their effort elsewhere. Their calendar app is missing obvious features - such as a search. Failing that, it would have been nice if they'd made this available on devices with real keyboards; then I might have considered playing around with it - though never trusting any answer I can't competently judge.

I am, however, happy to report that the for pay chatbot mode does not appear to be automatically included in the otherwise fairly comprehensive package I pay for, so presumably won't be "justifying" a price increase.

p.s. they've named their AI, presumably because they see no harm in confusing people into imagining chatbots are people. They call it "Lumo".

And to be fair, there's probably a fair amount of demand for such a feature. I'm merely not one of those demanding it.

p.p.s. Their getting started guide informs me that Lumo is indeed an LLM chat bot, though it doesn't use that term. It does a decent job of reminding people of chatbot limitations, particularly in terms of accuracy. It also informs me that Lumo is available via a web interface. https://lumo.proton.me/guest

D.O.P.-T.

Aug. 31st, 2025 07:39 pm
weofodthignen: selfportrait with Rune the cat (Default)
[personal profile] weofodthignen
August decided to fool the Chronicle weather guy and go out roaring: record high temps, highest temps since last fall ... the morning mist cleared early and the afternoon wind didn't arrive till well after 5.

Code deploy happening shortly

Aug. 31st, 2025 07:37 pm
mark: A photo of Mark kneeling on top of the Taal Volcano in the Philippines. It was a long hike. (Default)
[staff profile] mark posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance

Per the [site community profile] dw_news post regarding the MS/TN blocks, we are doing a small code push shortly in order to get the code live. As per usual, please let us know if you see anything wonky.

There is some code cleanup we've been doing that is going out with this push but I don't think there is any new/reworked functionality, so it should be pretty invisible if all goes well.

denise: Image: Me, facing away from camera, on top of the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome (Default)
[staff profile] denise posting in [site community profile] dw_news

A reminder to everyone that starting tomorrow, we are being forced to block access to any IP address that geolocates to the state of Mississippi for legal reasons while we and Netchoice continue fighting the law in court. People whose IP addresses geolocate to Mississippi will only be able to access a page that explains the issue and lets them know that we'll be back to offer them service as soon as the legal risk to us is less existential.

The block page will include the apology but I'll repeat it here: we don't do geolocation ourselves, so we're limited to the geolocation ability of our network provider. Our anti-spam geolocation blocks have shown us that their geolocation database has a number of mistakes in it. If one of your friends who doesn't live in Mississippi gets the block message, there is nothing we can do on our end to adjust the block, because we don't control it. The only way to fix a mistaken block is to change your IP address to one that doesn't register as being in Mississippi, either by disconnecting your internet connection and reconnecting it (if you don't have a static IP address) or using a VPN.

In related news, the judge in our challenge to Tennessee's social media age verification, parental consent, and parental surveillance law (which we are also part of the fight against!) ruled last month that we had not met the threshold for a temporary injunction preventing the state from enforcing the law while the court case proceeds.

The Tennesee law is less onerous than the Mississippi law and the fines for violating it are slightly less ruinous (slightly), but it's still a risk to us. While the fight goes on, we've decided to prevent any new account signups from anyone under 18 in Tennessee to protect ourselves against risk. We do not need to block access from the whole state: this only applies to new account creation.

Because we don't do any geolocation on our users and our network provider's geolocation services only apply to blocking access to the site entirely, the way we're implementing this is a new mandatory question on the account creation form asking if you live in Tennessee. If you do, you'll be unable to register an account if you're under 18, not just the under 13 restriction mandated by COPPA. Like the restrictions on the state of Mississippi, we absolutely hate having to do this, we're sorry, and we hope we'll be able to undo it as soon as possible.

Finally, I'd like to thank every one of you who's commented with a message of support for this fight or who's bought paid time to help keep us running. The fact we're entirely user-supported and you all genuinely understand why this fight is so important for everyone is a huge part of why we can continue to do this work. I've also sent a lot of your comments to the lawyers who are fighting the actual battles in court, and they find your wholehearted support just as encouraging and motivating as I do. Thank you all once again for being the best users any social media site could ever hope for. You make me proud and even more determined to yell at state attorneys general on your behalf.

D.O.P.-T.

Aug. 30th, 2025 11:51 pm
weofodthignen: selfportrait with Rune the cat (Default)
[personal profile] weofodthignen
The trumpet vine that used to reach over a high fence and wind into a street tree, creating a high arch of red and yellow flowers, got cut back a few years ago so the house could be sold with a boring garden. So I'm glad to see on my walks that someone's grapevine has leapt the fence and is extruding tendrils into the street tree on the other side. I wish it good luck.

D.O.P.-T.

Aug. 29th, 2025 11:36 pm
weofodthignen: selfportrait with Rune the cat (Default)
[personal profile] weofodthignen
The housemate and I went for a walk together: Mama Violet dove under the car when we emerged. In the evening, I walked the dog a bit late: Prudence stopped when she saw us coming down the driveway, fluffed her tail huge, and ran around the corner. Then I deposited recycling after dark: I turned around and Monty was sitting behind me, licking his chops. So he got food.

... The little house I mentioned yesterday, all 625 sq ft of it, sold for $1.2 million in 2021. On a listing price of $950K. Listed as 1 bedroom and 2 full baths, which I think is a "can't be bothered" error by the realtor. Well, it's gone now.

D.O.P.-T.

Aug. 28th, 2025 11:52 pm
weofodthignen: selfportrait with Rune the cat (Default)
[personal profile] weofodthignen
I absent-mindedly walked a block further than I'd planned. And discovered they'd demolished another of the small rental houses in the neighbourhood, probably today since there was a guy in a cat thingie levelling the ground. The yard really was a yard—hard-packed earth, used for parking—but it had a grapefruit tree, the only prickly pears I've seen around here, and a washing line that always seemed to have kiddie clothes on it. I hope the family went on to a nice house.

D.O.P.-T.

Aug. 27th, 2025 09:03 pm
weofodthignen: selfportrait with Rune the cat (Default)
[personal profile] weofodthignen
Yesterday, a crew did a one-day quick fix on the main road through the neighbourhood from one end of the park to the other, digging shallow trenches and infilling where the surface had subsided over pipes, and where the tarmac had been badly chopped up at one crossing (it looked as if someone had driven back and forth with a tank). I doubt the fix will last very long, and I got two lungs full of dust on my morning walk, but I can't fault their efforts to minimise disruption, and the repair at the pedestrian crossing will likely avoid some falls.

D.O.P.-T.

Aug. 26th, 2025 09:42 pm
weofodthignen: selfportrait with Rune the cat (Default)
[personal profile] weofodthignen
Saw all 3 cats today; Monty accepted food.

Today the sky was almost entirely blue: one or two of the tiny clouds came back and that was it. I was glad I got the bush-pruning done yesterday, when it was a smidgen cooler. (The ongoing effort to keep the bushes from entirely covering all the driveway-facing windows.)

D.O.P.-T.

Aug. 25th, 2025 09:26 pm
weofodthignen: selfportrait with Rune the cat (Default)
[personal profile] weofodthignen
The sun took a while to break through this morning, but once the sky cleared, it was dotted with tiny puffs of cloud.

Someone has moved in across the street. I hope they aren't mean to Mama Violet.
denise: Image: Me, facing away from camera, on top of the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome (Default)
[staff profile] denise posting in [site community profile] dw_news

I'll start with the tl;dr summary to make sure everyone sees it and then explain further: As of September 1, we will temporarily be forced to block access to Dreamwidth from all IP addresses that geolocate to Mississippi for legal reasons. This block will need to continue until we either win the legal case entirely, or the district court issues another injunction preventing Mississippi from enforcing their social media age verification and parental consent law against us.

Mississippi residents, we are so, so sorry. We really don't want to do this, but the legal fight we and Netchoice have been fighting for you had a temporary setback last week. We genuinely and honestly believe that we're going to win it in the end, but the Fifth Circuit appellate court said that the district judge was wrong to issue the preliminary injunction back in June that would have maintained the status quo and prevented the state from enforcing the law requiring any social media website (which is very broadly defined, and which we definitely qualify as) to deanonymize and age-verify all users and obtain parental permission from the parent of anyone under 18 who wants to open an account.

Netchoice took that appellate ruling up to the Supreme Court, who declined to overrule the Fifth Circuit with no explanation -- except for Justice Kavanaugh agreeing that we are likely to win the fight in the end, but saying that it's no big deal to let the state enforce the law in the meantime.

Needless to say, it's a big deal to let the state enforce the law in the meantime. The Mississippi law is a breathtaking state overreach: it forces us to verify the identity and age of every person who accesses Dreamwidth from the state of Mississippi and determine who's under the age of 18 by collecting identity documents, to save that highly personal and sensitive information, and then to obtain a permission slip from those users' parents to allow them to finish creating an account. It also forces us to change our moderation policies and stop anyone under 18 from accessing a wide variety of legal and beneficial speech because the state of Mississippi doesn't like it -- which, given the way Dreamwidth works, would mean blocking people from talking about those things at all. (And if you think you know exactly what kind of content the state of Mississippi doesn't like, you're absolutely right.)

Needless to say, we don't want to do that, either. Even if we wanted to, though, we can't: the resources it would take for us to build the systems that would let us do it are well beyond our capacity. You can read the sworn declaration I provided to the court for some examples of how unworkable these requirements are in practice. (That isn't even everything! The lawyers gave me a page limit!)

Unfortunately, the penalties for failing to comply with the Mississippi law are incredibly steep: fines of $10,000 per user from Mississippi who we don't have identity documents verifying age for, per incident -- which means every time someone from Mississippi loaded Dreamwidth, we'd potentially owe Mississippi $10,000. Even a single $10,000 fine would be rough for us, but the per-user, per-incident nature of the actual fine structure is an existential threat. And because we're part of the organization suing Mississippi over it, and were explicitly named in the now-overturned preliminary injunction, we think the risk of the state deciding to engage in retaliatory prosecution while the full legal challenge continues to work its way through the courts is a lot higher than we're comfortable with. Mississippi has been itching to issue those fines for a while, and while normally we wouldn't worry much because we're a small and obscure site, the fact that we've been yelling at them in court about the law being unconstitutional means the chance of them lumping us in with the big social media giants and trying to fine us is just too high for us to want to risk it. (The excellent lawyers we've been working with are Netchoice's lawyers, not ours!)

All of this means we've made the extremely painful decision that our only possible option for the time being is to block Mississippi IP addresses from accessing Dreamwidth, until we win the case. (And I repeat: I am absolutely incredibly confident we'll win the case. And apparently Justice Kavanaugh agrees!) I repeat: I am so, so sorry. This is the last thing we wanted to do, and I've been fighting my ass off for the last three years to prevent it. But, as everyone who follows the legal system knows, the Fifth Circuit is gonna do what it's gonna do, whether or not what they want to do has any relationship to the actual law.

We don't collect geolocation information ourselves, and we have no idea which of our users are residents of Mississippi. (We also don't want to know that, unless you choose to tell us.) Because of that, and because access to highly accurate geolocation databases is extremely expensive, our only option is to use our network provider's geolocation-based blocking to prevent connections from IP addresses they identify as being from Mississippi from even reaching Dreamwidth in the first place. I have no idea how accurate their geolocation is, and it's possible that some people not in Mississippi might also be affected by this block. (The inaccuracy of geolocation is only, like, the 27th most important reason on the list of "why this law is practically impossible for any site to comply with, much less a tiny site like us".)

If your IP address is identified as coming from Mississippi, beginning on September 1, you'll see a shorter, simpler version of this message and be unable to proceed to the site itself. If you would otherwise be affected, but you have a VPN or proxy service that masks your IP address and changes where your connection appears to come from, you won't get the block message, and you can keep using Dreamwidth the way you usually would.

On a completely unrelated note while I have you all here, have I mentioned lately that I really like ProtonVPN's service, privacy practices, and pricing? They also have a free tier available that, although limited to one device, has no ads or data caps and doesn't log your activity, unlike most of the free VPN services out there. VPNs are an excellent privacy and security tool that every user of the internet should be familiar with! We aren't affiliated with Proton and we don't get any kickbacks if you sign up with them, but I'm a satisfied customer and I wanted to take this chance to let you know that.

Again, we're so incredibly sorry to have to make this announcement, and I personally promise you that I will continue to fight this law, and all of the others like it that various states are passing, with every inch of the New Jersey-bred stubborn fightiness you've come to know and love over the last 16 years. The instant we think it's less legally risky for us to allow connections from Mississippi IP addresses, we'll undo the block and let you know.

D.O.P.-T.

Aug. 24th, 2025 11:14 pm
weofodthignen: selfportrait with Rune the cat (Default)
[personal profile] weofodthignen
There aren't many palm trees here, but a few front gardens do have them. On my walk a few days ago, I found the pavement/sidewalk littered with green leaves from one—not the whole frond, just the fringy bits, like huge blades of grass. I can't figure out what happened. Meanwhile they haven't been cleared and are starting to creep up and down the street. Today I found one a block away.

D.O.P.-T.

Aug. 23rd, 2025 09:27 pm
weofodthignen: selfportrait with Rune the cat (Default)
[personal profile] weofodthignen
I raked the grass in front; if I can face it in the heat, I plan to mow it tomorrow. As I got started, Mama Violet came shooting out from under a car and fled up the driveway. Silly girl would have been perfectly safe noshing on the porch. Or "hiding" there, for that matter.

Her two kids were there in the evening when I took out recycling, so I got to put out extra food for them.

The dog spent half the night huddled with me, despite my playing the main role in taking her to the vet, poor scared girl.
arlie: (Default)
[personal profile] arlie
I've recently added Robert Reich's substack to my collection of political blogs - so recently that I haven't yet redirected it to be filed into its own mailbox, as I generally do with anything political or otherwise high stress. I suspect this subscription won't last - too high frequency, and slightly lower quality than my two other overtly political blogs. But while I have it, I might as well post about its flaws, particularly the kind where I suspect it's giving the majority of its subscribers precisely what they want.

In this case, what Robert Reich is serving up is implausible hyperbole, in the form of what I'd call a clickbait heading, except that I and most of his other subscribers are emailed whole articles, so there's little point to clickbait.

In particular, it appears that on August 23, 1971, Lewis F. Powell, Jr. wrote a memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce which Robert Reich deems to be the "worst memo in history". I believe that's Reich-speak for "I really don't like it" or maybe even "of all the memos I can remember right now, this is the one I like least".

It's vanishingly likely to have been the literal worst, even if there were an objective standard of badness - and flat out impossible for Reich or anyone else to be certain there had never been a worse one.

Read more... )
arlie: (Default)
[personal profile] arlie
A few days ago, someone offered me a "free" article from the Washington Post (Wapo). Reading it required registering with Wapo, giving them a valid email address and responding to a message sent to that address.

The first unsolicited message from Wapo arrived the next day; the second showed up this morning.

Because I use Protonmail, it had offered me the option of creating an email alias just for Wapo. I had done so. Both unwanted messages arrived complete with a prominent label that they'd come from such an alias, and a button to use to disable the alias. I don't remember for sure, but I almost certainly attempted to unsubscribe from Wapo messages on receipt of their first spamvertisement. So today I clicked to disable this alias. Protonmail first sent another(?) unsubscription request on my behalf, then disabled the alias.

And that, boys and girls, is the reason I switched to Protonmail in the first place. The last time I tried to read this kind of "free" message, from some other well known media source, getting rid of the stream of unwanted messages was somewhat more difficult. The journal ignored unsubscription requests - or possibly merely had subscribed me to a bazillion different spam streams, each needing its own unsubscribe - and I wound up reporting them as spammers to my email provider, as well as teaching Mac Mail to send their messages straight to "junk".

This latest experience with modern business practices was much less painful.

D.O.P.-T.

Aug. 22nd, 2025 10:58 pm
weofodthignen: selfportrait with Rune the cat (Default)
[personal profile] weofodthignen
We got morning cloudiness again today, and after the sun burned through it wasn't as hot as yesterday. Which was good because we had to take the poor dog in for her annual physical. She was terrified; waiting in the exam room, she barked up a storm and raked her claws down the wall in one corner, doing damage. She'd forgotten she liked the new vet, and the vet didn't like her nearly as much this time. But she doesn't have to go on diet food, because we've managed to slim her down enough by reducing her rations.
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