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.

I did a thing

Aug. 23rd, 2025 07:16 pm
plonq: (Trying to be cute)
[personal profile] plonq
My stint as a contractor came to an end on the 31st of July this year. To be more accurate, it was supposed to end on that day, but somebody in IT accidentally rescinded my system access at the end of day on the 30th, so I showed up for work on the 31st and found out that I was locked out of everything. I walked over to the office of the Deskside Support guys over on the other building and told them to come collect my laptop, then handed my pass card to the receptionist and went home.

I billed them for an hour, so it was a pretty easy hundred bucks for me, but I'd have liked to say goodbye to the rest of my group over Teams.

Anyway, on to "the thing" that I did.

Now that I'm re-retired, I have been trying to make better use of my time than I did during the previous iteration of my retirement. At [personal profile] atara's prompting, I am giving myself at least one thing to accomplish every day.

We have some bottle lights that we bought from the front yard about ten years ago. We got them from a place called Jysk - which is a Danish chain that we liken to being a bargain-basement Ikea. They hang from the trees out front by strings, and other than having to replace those every couple of years, they've otherwise been reliable. Until this year.

When we put them out this spring, only one of them lit. And it was only working sporadically, flickering and blinking in the dark.

Somewhere in the shapeless morass of trivia I've managed to cram into my brain over the years is the knowledge that when a solar-powered garden light fails, the most likely cause is the power switch, followed by the battery. I suspected that this was the case with our bottle lights, so I picked up a remarkably cheap, 40-watt soldering iron last weekend. (Seriously, this thing was $7.95, so I'm not expecting a lifetime of service from it.) On Tuesday, I pulled down all of the bottle lights, disassembled them, and bridged the contacts for the on/of switches.

When I had them apart, I discovered why one of the had been blinking. The bottles are suppsoed to have corks to keep the rain out of them, but this one had lost its cork, and the bottom of the bottle had filled with water. As it swayed in the wind, the rust-filled water would complete the connection on the power switch and it would briefly light. Fortunately, I'd saved the base from a bottle that had broken earlier, because the circuit board in this one was badly corroded. I threw away the bad one and replaced it with the spare. I also sealed the top of the bottle to prevent more water from getting in.

That evening, three of the eight bottles lit. Barely. They had a wan glow that told of batteries that were on their last legs. The lights use standard AAA NiMH batteries, so I knew that they could be easily replaced.

But... when I shopped around online for replacements, I discovered that rechargeable NiMH batteries are not cheap. I mean, they don't cost a fortune either, but they cost more than I wanted to spend on these cheap lights. I finally broke my "no Amazon" rule and ordered a 24-pack of the cheapest ones I could find. They arrived today, and I swapped out all of the batteries this afternoon. As I swapped them, I took each bottle into garage to make sure it was working.

100% success. Our front yard should look much more merry and whimsical after sundown tonight.

Home From Worldcon

Aug. 19th, 2025 08:04 am
kevin_standlee: (Gavel of WSFS)
[personal profile] kevin_standlee
I got home from Seattle yesterday, after a smooth flight (first class is spoiling me).

Who He )

It was a great Worldcon for Kayla. My contribution was minimal, as expected, and that's fine.

Today is a booked day of rest. Lots of sleep needed. If only I could sleep while Kayla had fun.

WSFS MPC Retirement

Aug. 15th, 2025 08:43 pm
kevin_standlee: Logo created for 2005 Worldcon and sometimes used for World Science Fiction Society business (WSFS Logo)
[personal profile] kevin_standlee
On Thursday morning of Worldcon Seattle 2025, I attended the final meeting of my term as an elected member of the WSFS Mark Protection Committee. There was a fair bit of confusion about where the meeting would be, but we did eventually end up at a meeting room in the Sheraton.

As is typical these days, all we did was receive some reports and punt most decision on to the MPC's next term. I did address the members at the end and thanked them for having been able to serve as an elected member for so many years. The MPC then officially thanked me and I got a round of applause.

I told them at the meeting that they might want to take a good look at me, as there's a non-zero chance that this would have been the last time they were going to see me.

After the meeting, Don Eastlake and I both had errands best suited to Walgreens, and since I knew where is was, we walked there together and got our stuff. I'd initially considered getting a burrito from Chipotle to have later, but the lunchtime queue there was out the door, so I thought better of it.

That was the sole item at Seattle 2025 for which we needed my membership badge. Kayla will do the rest of the work this week.

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