nameandnature | Entries tagged with livejournal

dw_news | PSA: Likely LiveJournal password compromise: Passwords used on LiveJournal around 2014 have probably been compromised. Dreamwidth noticed because accounts where people had common passwords on both sites got hacked on DW. Use a password manager, people.
(tags: livejournal fail security password dreamwidth)
Books in Which No Bad Things Happen | Tor.com: A list, including contributions from commenters.
(tags: books science-fiction)
Walks south of Cambridge: I did one, it was nice. Bookmarking to try others.
(tags: walking hiking cambridge)
bigH/git-fuzzy: interactive `git` with the help of `fzf`: A CLI interface to git that relies heavily on fzf (version 0.21.0 or higher).
(tags: git productivity fzf)

Originally posted at Name and Nature. You can comment there (where there are currently comments) or here.

I’ve been tidying up my website a bit, and I’ve put everything which used to be on LiveJournal on Dreamwidth, with a view to closing LJ (or replacing all the stuff there with redirects) and using DW as a bit of diary/venting place now LJ’s looking increasingly dodgy. It’s odd to type stuff into a LJ-clone, feels a bit retro, but in a nice way, like a comfy old jumper. Twitter’s a cesspool and neither it nor Facebook are good for more than a few sentences of text.

I’ve also spruced up things on the proper blog a bit, adding a funky new style. I got Journalpress going to post stuff from the proper blog to Dreamwidth, and did my very first GitHub pull request to add a feature to it. This started me off on a “add all my things to GitHub” kick, currently there’s just my LJ New Comments script, but there’s a bunch of other bits I want to keep somewhere sensible rather than on my laptop.

Twust

On the subject of cesspools, has anyone done a thing for Twitter which only shows you replies from people followed by you or the people you follow? Someone really should layer a web-of-trust over the top of it, but I hear their API is designed to stop you doing interesting things with it, because you run into rate limiting. It’s so bad TwitRSSme apparently does stuff by screen-scraping instead, which is icky but possibly unavoidable.

Originally posted at Name and Nature. You can comment there (where there are currently comments) or here.

“The Linux of social media”—How LiveJournal pioneered (then lost) blogging | Ars Technica: A brief history of LiveJournal. Those were the days.
(tags: livejournal blogging internet social-networks)

Originally posted at Name and Nature. You can comment there. There are currently comments.

I’ve updated the little script I wrote to keep track of which comments are new on LJ and Dreamwidth (LJ now does this automatically in its default style, DW doesn’t, by the looks of it). Thanks to various people for telling me it was broken for HTTPS sites, which LJ and DW both default to these days.

Userscripts.org is long dead, so I’m now hosting it on my site.

Originally posted at Name and Nature. You can comment there. There are currently comments.

I’ve updated the little script I wrote to keep track of which comments are new on LJ and Dreamwidth (LJ now does this automatically in its default style, DW doesn’t, by the looks of it). Thanks to sally_maria for alerting me to both the problem and the solution.

Userscripts.org is long dead, so I’m now hosting it on my site.

Originally posted at Name and Nature. You can comment there. There are currently comments.

I’m mostly writing this down so I remember it, but maybe it’ll also come in useful to other people. This is how I converted from LJ to WordPress.

Getting data out of LJ

WordPress’s LiveJournal importer is buggy and doesn’t do a bunch of stuff I want (such as re-writing links to my own posts so that they now point to the new blog). Luckily, jwz has been here before, and wrote a Perl script to download a journal and output WordPress’s XML import/export format. This does better, but needed a bit of hacking to suit my obsessive need to avoid information loss in the transfer to WP. I’ve stuck my own version here: the comment at the top describes what I changed. You’ll need LJ::GetCookieSession. Like all Perl scripts, this one is configured by global variables near the top, so you’ll need to change those too. You then say
ljgrabber.pl -v --wordpress --comments > wordpress.xml
and then upload wordpress.xml to the WordPress importer (Tools, Import on the WordPress dashboard).

Note that I haven’t used any of the other advertised options (to re-write bits of your LJ so they point to the new blog) in my modified version of the script, so damned if I know whether they work, crash, or delete your journal. Probably best to try it on a spare journal first, I’d've thought.

Installing

I ran through WordPress’s famous 5 minute install having stuck the untarred WP download in the right place on my site. Excitingly, this left wp-config.php (which has stuff like the database password in it) with both public read and public write permissions (assuming it was the installer and I wasn’t immediately pwned by something before anyone had seen the blog). So, you might want to watch for that.

Plugins you will want

Akismet: WordPress blogs attract a lot of spam comments. Akismet kills them all. Possibly there’s something I can do about this to make my blog less obviously a WordPress one, but I haven’t worked out what they’re using to identify it yet.
Avalicious will grab user pictures from LJ if your commenters specify a LiveJournal as their website URL. Since jwz’s Perl script produces such comments, installing this gets you the familiar looking icons for everyone. Note that you will want to apply jwz’s patch or it’ll kill your performance on pages containing comments from people who deleted their journals.
Live Comment Preview: cos it’s handy.
Subscribe to Comments: nearest thing I’ve found to LJ’s email functionality. I’m not sure whether it’s actually emailing you replies to your comment or just any new comments. Probably should check that.
LiveJournal Crossposter: does what it says on the tin. Note that if you go back and edit imported posts, it seems to want to post them again (presumably because the imported posts don’t have whatever magic it uses to tell that they’re already posted to LJ), but for posts which it has cross-posted for you, it’s clever enough to apply subsequent edits back to LJ, too. Note that there’s a setting which controls whether it just posts excerpts or the whole entry. For now, I’ve set it to the whole thing, even if it does mean the Russian mafia are getting advertising revenue from my writing.
Updraft Plus Backup/Restore: backs up the database and files to Google Drive, which I wasn’t using for anything else.
WP Super Cache: Crimefighting Jesus told me to, and he runs the hosting company, so he should know.

I expect I’ll tart it up a bit at some point but the default theme seems reasonable enough for now. Any other top tips welcome, I guess.

Originally published at Name and Nature. Please leave any comments there.

So, I've been looking into ways of running a "proper" blog, and I've come down to PyBlosxom or Wordpress. In either case, I'll get my own hosting for it.

Advantages of PyBlosxom over Wordpress:

Keeps entries in text files. I fear databases.
Seems to have a better security record than Wordpress.
In Python, so hackable and I'd feel I'd have some hope of understanding what it's doing (Wordpress is in PHP).

Advantages of Wordpress over PyBlosxom:

Very active developer community, so lots of nice plugins. (PyBlosxom isn't abandoned but doesn't have so many people working on it).
More themes, some of which are pretty (PyBlosxom has a few themes in their repository, none of which are that pretty).

Anyone who's used either of those care to comment?

A thing I found while investigating how to get journal backups going again in the wake of LJ's most recent debacle:

A while back, geeks kept saying that LiveJournal should be Usenet news, that is, instead of mucking about with all the tedious web forum stuff, it'd be nice to have a program which let you read comments and entries, kept track of threading and which comments you'd already read, and so on (remembering what you've read on LJ was the motivation for my LJ New Comments script, but that doesn't avoid LJ's clunky interface).

This was tricky as there was no obvious way to get all the comments from an entry. There was the old comment export thing, but that only works on your own journal. You could "screen scrape" with a program that tried to pull the comments from the human-readable versions of LJ's pages, but that's considered rude because of the load it'd put on LJ's server, and it's fragile as it might break if LJ changes the human-readable output.

Luckily, LJ added a bunch of new stuff to its existing interface for "clients" (programs which access LJ, like Semagic). This includes the getcomments method, which allows you to get all the comments on any entry you can see.

Add this to the existing machine-readable stuff (Atom feeds, getfriendspage) and you could probably write either a client specific for LJ (the iPhone client is the reason LJ added the getcomments method, by the looks of it) or a proxy to turn the whole thing into NNTP and let you use conventional Usenet clients. Who's first?

(Personally, I still plan to be off once I can actually back up this journal, including the comments of my esteemed readers. But I won't stop reading, so this would be a nifty toy even for me.)

Edit: another thing this allows is third parties offering comment feeds of your journal: someone could write a thing which turned the comments from an LJ entry into an Atom feed. Real blogs have these, so LJ could too.

The latest code release onto LiveJournal has introduced a problem where people are randomly getting logged into the wrong journals. This exposes friends locked and filtered entries belonging to those journals to those random people. ~~There's no indication that this used to read the locked entries of a specific, targeted user, but there's no analysis of the problem available, so we don't know that it can't be, either.~~ Edit: It looks like this was a problem with caching. If that's true, it's unlikely that it could have been used to read posts from a specific user. More here from

cahwyguy.

More information is available here.

This has been going on since at least yesterday morning, ~~yet LJ still hasn't responded officially to reports of the problem or warned users that their private data is at risk.~~ Edit: LJ has posted about the problem, however, they don't seem to have some details right. For instance, they're claiming it was only a problem for a few minutes, when people were noticing it all day on Thursday.

This is the second time that LJ has dealt with a major security incident with staggering incompetence. It illustrates that they apparently don't have a test server, i.e. they're a bunch of coyboys. My vague plans to move this blog just got a lot less vague.

I was getting too much spam, so I've turned off anonymous comments. LJ's anti-spam system was correctly flagging a lot of it, but I can't help feel that it should just bin the more obvious stuff (with a rejection message so humans know what happened).

LJ's code base being what it is, this may also disallow logins via OpenID and TwitonMyFaceSpace, I'm not sure.

I'm still planning on moving away from LJ as soon as I get some spare hours to do it in.

New Statesman - Faith no more: "Earlier this year, Andrew Zak Williams asked public figures why they believe in God. Now it’s the turn of the atheists – from A C Grayling to P Z Myers – to explain why they don’t "
(tags: atheism richard-dawkins philip-pullman daniel-dennett sam-harris)
Pompous Theist: You've seen Advice Dog and Courage Wolf, now enjoy Pompous Theist. Well observed stuff: I've seen quite a few of these "arguments" in my time.
(tags: atheism meme funny humour theism religion)
“Shut Up, Rich Boy”: The Problem With “Privilege.” | No, Seriously, What About Teh Menz?: "I’m a feminist writer, but I don’t like to use the word “privilege” in my writing. Here’s why not:"
(tags: feminism privilege)
Why Have Hackers Hit Russia's Most Popular Blogging Service? - TIME: Where LJ has been the past week or so. For once, it's not their fault.
(tags: internet security livejournal politics ddos)

LiveJournal coughs to their crimes, sort of

So, LiveJournal finally sort of owned up to getting blacklisted for helping spammers, as mentioned previously. This posting is their response to the situation. They say they're doing the right things, although you do have to wonder what took them so long.

They didn't name Spamhaus or properly explain why they'd been blacklisted, so I explained in the comments.

The spice must flow

Notifications are coming through now because LJ have changed the IP address of their outgoing mail server from 208.93.0.128 (the address of www.livejournal.com) to 208.93.0.49 (which calls itself mail.livejournal.net, but isn't accepting inbound mail). The blacklisting for the old address is still in place. The spammy journals specifically mentioned in the SBL listing seem to have been suspended, though.

It's not clear if this change of IP address is part of some agreement between Spamhaus and LJ or whether LJ think they can avoid the blacklist and continue to ignore complaints. If it's the latter, I'm fetching popcorn. It's the work of a few keystrokes for Spamhaus to block LJ's entire address range, and I vaguely recall they've been happy to do that in the past for people who've taken the piss.

(Disclaimer: I'm not Spamhaus, I just used to hang out on news.admin.net-abuse.email in the 1990s, when it was cool).

Postings in

news have been a bit cagey about what's going on with comment notification emails. They've mentioned that there's a "third party" involved. It turns out that LiveJournal have got themselves blacklisted by the Spamhaus Block List for providing spam support services, in this case, hosting websites for spammers.

This is why comment notifications aren't getting through: the SBL is a widely respected and widely used email blacklist. They're not saying LJ are spammers or indeed sending spam email, they are saying that LJ aren't taking down journals set up by spammers, so they're effectively helping the spammers to spam. Most email spam directs the mark to a website, so providing those websites is a serious matter to Spamhaus.

This is worrying: it means LJ probably aren't responding to complaints about hosting the spammers' sites. I think Spamhaus would have tried sending email to abuse@lj, though possibly not under their own names, as you want to be sure that reports from ordinary users are handled correctly, same way as restaurant reviewers don't book saying "I'm Jones from the Times". The detailed information from Spamhaus lists a huge number of spammy journals, and at least a couple of them were still there when I tried them. This doesn't bode well for LJ's future, to my mind.

livredor brought this to my attention. There's a thread on a

news posting discussing the problem.

azurelunatic (who is head of anti-spam for Dreamwidth) has more here, and I've commented on their posting.

Here are what I think are my best posts of 2010:

The bad arguments series: theist guff about worldviews (including the "atheism is a religion" line which seems to have cropped up a lot lately), atheists' embarrassing errors about the Bible and gays or "Why President Bartlet was wrong", and theist guff about science. I realised I promised more on science at the end of the last one, and some day I may get round to writing it.
The Special Edition of Bishops Gone Wild, when the Lords Spiritual got their way with the Equality Bill.
My post on Georges Rey's Meta-atheism: Religious Avowal as Self-Deception drew together some previous thoughts on how much believers actually believe.
Is the Creator good? drew together Hume, William Lane Craig and Ptolemy the Gnostic to show that, even if there are such things as personal Creators, we don't seem to have much reason to call them good. No-one commented on the article, but I assume that was because my argument was so devastating as to admit no rebuttal.
Bigots, Brown, Justice, Laws is mostly about the ruling on Gary McFarlane, a relationship counsellor who was sacked by Relate for refusing to give therapy to homosexual couples.
Q: When is a person like a rock? A: When there's no God got the most comments this year, although all of them were either by me or Comrade. If you can't be bothered to read the entire lot, I think my summary is a reasonable one.
Reform and the Interminable Anglican Sex Kerfuffle, in which the Guardian's Andrew Brown discovers complementarianism. Contains a picture of me dressed as a bishop, if that's your thing.
A great cloud of witlessness: the Not Ashamed campaign criticises people who think they're living in a Frank Peretti novel.

As I hinted at in that last post of mine, this has been a difficult year for me, culminating in my ongoing divorce proceedings after my then wife unexpectedly told me that she considered that whole "forsaking all others" thing as less of a solemn vow and more of a guideline. I've taken a long look at my priorities as a result, and resolved to spent less time arguing with idiots on the Internet (so, if you see me back on the Premier Christian Radio forums, remind me of my resolution) and more time going out dancing. There'll probably be fewer posts of substance from me in 2011; however, I'm perfectly happy to argue with sane and sensible people, and I doubt I'll be able to resist that urge entirely.

Thanks to my friends and family for all their support, and to the strangers who wrote to ask where I'd gone during the hiatus in my postings. May 2011 be a better year for us all.

I've just updated LJ New Comments, the Firefox extension which remembers which comments you've read on LiveJournal or Dreamwidth and allows you to find new comments easily. It'll now remember comments on syndicated journals (that is, those which are actually feeds from external sites).

LiveJournal are annoying me sufficiently that I'm seriously considering moving this blog to another site. I'd appreciate recommendations for alternative sites or blogging software.

What they've done

As jld explains in more detail, LiveJournal are including code from Driving Revenue Inc., an advertising company, in every page they serve (including friends-locked postings). When you move your mouse over a link, the code tells Driving Revenue's site, outboundlink.me, what the link is. Their site responds with a new link. If you click, your browser ends up where Driving Revenue said to go, which may or may not be where you though you'd end up.

The point of all this messing about is to make money from affiliate links. Some sites will give you money for sending traffic their way. These sites know it's you sending them traffic because they give you an affiliate code. When you link to that site from your own, you append the affiliate code to the link. Driving Revenue re-writes those links so they'll make them money instead, and passes a cut to LJ.

If you've got a free account on LJ, re-writing links would be fair enough. One of the ways LJ covers the cost of free accounts is through advertising. But I'm paying LJ money so this blog won't have adverts on it. If they're going to break that contract, I don't want to pay them any more money.

Also, even for free accounts, the way LJ/Driving Revenue have implemented this is very dodgy.

Why it's dodgy

Firstly, this is bad for privacy and security. LJ are disclosing any link you happen to move your mouse over to Driving Revenue, so I hope nothing you link to in your locked entries is confidential. Worse, the way this has been implemented gives Driving Revenue the same authority as LJ: they can more or less do what they like, including stealing your cookies and impersonating you. Even if Driving Revenue aren't malicious, they are incompetent ( as described below), and security problems at Driving Revenue now potentially become security problems at LJ. LJ went to a lot of trouble to lock down this sort of problem a while ago. Now they've given away the keys to the kingdom.

Secondly, Driving Revenue Inc are incompetent. They've had multiple attempts at the script now, and it's still not right. You might have noticed that when you move your mouse over a link on LJ and quickly click on it, nothing happens. This seems to be because moving the mouse starts the process described above, and clicks don't "take" until it's finished. On top of this, the script is too zealous. It re-writes links in a way which breaks them (for example, andrewducker recently linked to this article: if you click the link, you'll end up somewhere random on the same site).

What I might do about it

I'm using Adblock to block the script, so I'm not affected by it, but people visiting my blog are. This isn't what I'm paying for, so, unless LJ sort it out soon, I'm off. Wherever I end up, I'll keep reading my friend list here, and I'll probably cross-post and direct comments to my new home.

The traditional thing to do is to flounce to Dreamwidth, but that seems to be intended for people who enjoy mannerist identity politics and writing about how their fanfiction in which Snape vigorously rogers Harry Potter will inevitably smash the kyriarchy. But seriously, Dreamwidth is in active development and they're doing some cool stuff, though I'm a bit worried they'll run out of money. I don't want to move again, so I'm looking for somewhere stable, preferably under my own domain.

So, I've been playing with Wordpress, which I've installed on the hosting account for my own domain. It looks quite nice. The only downside is a half-hearted implementation of threaded comments: Wordpress allows threads up to 10 comments deep and then just stops letting people reply, rather than doing something sensible like folding them. It's possible to use third party commenting sites like Disqus or Intense Debate with it, though, and those seem to do threading better. Edited: Wordpress does "proper" blog stuff like comment feeds and pingbacks, which I'm currently doing with Python scripts and gaffer tape on my LJ, which also gives it an advantage over Dreamwidth.

I've got access to scripting languages and MySQL, and I presume there are other blogging packages out there: any recommendations?

Experimental Theology: How Facebook Killed the Church: Richard Beck reckons Facebook killed the radio star, erm, church: "Millennials will report that the "reason" they are leaving the church is due to its perceived hypocrisy or shallowness. My argument is that while this might be the proximate cause the more distal cause is social computing. Already connected Millennials have the luxury to kick the church to the curb. This is the position of strength that other generations did not have. We fussed about the church but, at the end of the day, you went to stay connected. For us, church was Facebook!"
(tags: facebook church society religion christianity social-networks generation-y internet)
A nice cup of rabies - What is LJ doing to my links? Part 4: LJ has been messing about with links to Amazon and other online shops: there's some Javascript which they're serving which re-writes the links (possibly to get LJ some money as an affiliate) and then makes the browser display the old link when you mouse over it. The script source is posted here: it's illuminating.

You do wonder how long LJ can keep cocking it up like this. I'm still here because I don't think Dreamwidth is financially credible and I've noticed that people who've moved tend to get fewer comments, but I'm annoyed that this script was also served on the journals of paying users and boggling at LJ's excuse that they didn't check what the thing did before they started serving it: putting unknown Javascript on your site is such a good idea.
(tags: livejournal internet dreamwidth javascript programming)
A Trailer for Every Academy Award Winning Movie Ever - Funny Videos | Cracked.com: "LEAD FEMALE'S NAAAAAME!"
(tags: funny video movies trailer humour comedy parody cracked movie)
Persecute me – I’m after the Brownie points | Frank Skinner - Times Online: Frank Skinner (who's a Catholic) on whether Christians are persecuted in the UK. "We’re a bit like Goths — no one can remember us being fashionable and we talk about death a lot. I love the glorious un-coolness of that"
(tags: catholic christian christianity church culture religion politics uk society funny)

Made from Truth and Lies - The TRUTH about Livejournal: "LiveJournal is 95 percent female. Like an acting club or cheerleading squad, the minority of males who use it are either gay or there for the chicks. The all-female atmosphere means that 95 percent of LJ comments consist of people hugging each other, and the other 5 percent consist of people apologizing for judging someone’s Harry Potter rape fanart." I'm there for the chicks, obviously.
(tags: livejournal funny parody)

As promised, the link blog stuff is now working. It's pulling links and descriptions from my Delicious bookmarks and posting them to LJ in batches of 10 or more, or when there's stuff to be posted and nothing's been posted for 4 days. Let me know if it becomes annoying.

Here comes the science

It turns out there's a PHP script called Delicious Glue to do this, but that would involve using PHP, so no (gateway drug: next thing you know, you'll be using Perl). It looks like that script also doesn't cope with the brave new world of Unicode terribly well, doesn't tag the LJ post using the tags from Delicious, and doesn't support the elaborate posting scheme described in the previous paragraph. Also, it wasn't invented here.

So I did it in Python. Mark Pilgrim's excellent Universal Feed Parser module does much of the heavy lifting. Posting to LJ using XML RPC turns out to be surprisingly easy using the built-in xmlrpclib. Most of the faff comes in getting it to persist state between runs of the script, which I'm doing using pickle. Here's the code: you'd need to be a programmer to adapt it for your own use, but if you are, it shouldn't be hard. I'll probably run it daily using cron.

Link blog?

I keep a sort of mini blog over at Delicious. It's a collection of links I want to save, plus a short description. On LiveJournal, there's a feed of it at

pw201_links, but there's no point posting comments there, as I won't see them.

andrewducker regularly posts batches of his links to his LJ, and they often create some interesting discussion. I wondered whether I should do the same, or whether that would mean death was too good for me, as it is for those people who use Loudtwitter to post their "tweets" to LJ. I'd probably post links once a week or in batches of 10, whichever happened sooner. What do you think?

[Poll #1462193]

LJ links up with Google ads

As you might have seen over on

news, LJ have formed a partnership with Google, allowing users who pay for their journals to place Google ads on them and earn a bit of money (LJ itself probably makes money off people who sign up, they're not taking a cut of the money for people viewing the ads).

I won't be doing this, as the small amount of money I might make from ads isn't worth the annoyance to my readers. As someone whose comment I can't find said, it looks like LJ have done this to keep up with other services like Wordpress, who offer ads as an option. SUP bought out LJ because LJ apparently is blogging in Russia, so perhaps this is part of a trend. I hope they might do more "serious blogging" stuff as opposed to social networking stuff: I'd like to see LJ on my own domain working properly, comment feeds (so I don't have to do it myself with Python scripts and gaffer tape), Google Analytics, and a pony.

Of course, the best thing about

news postings is the hordes of whining commenters and the responses mocking them for whining. Pages 6 and 7 are particular rich in put-downs and image macros. It's interesting to see that the "bugger off to Dreamwidth" response is getting popular: DW has made a name for itself as the place where you flounce to because The Man is keeping you down, Man. Fandom folk are pretty self-aware, so they mock this stereotype themselves. All good fun.