so, this happened

[james_davis_nicoll]

What does this user agreement mean, exactly?

Comments

[kaffyr]

I've done quick read, and it appears to contradict itself in a couple of places (i.e. Russian Federation laws apply to everything except when they don't). However, because the English translation a) may be suspect and b) isn't the "valid" translation according to the agreement preamble, (the "valid" one being in Cyrillic Russian) I can't judge it.

The fact that I can't access my journal completely unless I agree, that I can't cross-post unless I agree, etc. etc. makes me less and less apt to want to agree. Of course SUP can do this, because it's SUP's baby, and of course a lot of folks have said that it's No Big Thing for various reasons. I still don't like it, especially since I'm *not* "getting it for free" - I pay for my account. And actually, I'm not sure whether my paid account is worth it at this point.

[james_davis_nicoll]

I wonder how much of my lj is recoverable to archive?

[kaffyr]

At least one person on my list is thinking of 1) signing the agreement in order to fully access her journal; 2) letting folks know via a pinned post that she plans to import to Dreamwidth everything up to a date certain; c) at that date certain, deleting her LJ account after giving people contact information for those who still refuse to go to Dreamwidth.

It sounds like a plan I'll be considering over the next day or so.

[leecetheartist]

I believe it can be done across to Dreamwidth with no problems, because husband rdmasters on livejournal and rdm here did it for me.

[(Anonymous)]

tried archive.org also?

[soon_lee]

Some years ago, I imported my LJ to DW. I expect these instructions still work.

[beamjockey]

I get (unsurprisingly):
Your import has failed to import.
XMLRPC failure: Terms of Service agreement required


It was worth a try.

[dewline]

I guess I timed my import properly, then...

[soon_lee]

That was a really sucky thing to do: forcing users to accept the new ToS before allowing them to login.

[austin_dern]

Here's what the lj-news post about it says the agreement means:

Control of LiveJournal as a blogging platform has been transferred to SUP Media LLC, a legal entity based in the Russian Federation. This decision stems from the urge to become closer to our users, most of whom live in Europe and Russia. Every LiveJournal user will be offered to sign the new User Agreement with SUP Media. Paid services, however, will still be provided by Live Journal Inc.

Despite the changes, LiveJournal remains an international blogging platform. Specifically, LiveJournal’s policy on user privacy and data security has undergone no major changes.

Starting from April 4th 2017, non-authorized users will see advertisements on all LiveJournal pages.

The accounts system is simplified. Accounts are now differentiated only by their authorization type:
- Account (authorization via LiveJournal login and password);
- Identity Account (authorization via social networks accounts or OpenID).

LiveJournal users can continue using additional packages of services to expand the potential of their accounts. The “Professional” services package, available in the LiveJournal Shop, is almost identical to the former Paid account package – except that available disk space has been increased to 100 GB. Accounts with the “Permanent” services package (formerly Permanent accounts) now have 1 TB disk space available.

All accounts with additional services packages in effect on April 4th 2017, will be granted extra time for those packages. They will be extended by half of the last paid period.

I did see in the new user agreement some paragraphs in bold text, but have no idea whether that means they're the new ones or the changed ones or whether that just means someone didn't close a bold tag properly.

[kaffyr]

Yup - although they're not explaining how the blogging platform has been transferred to the Russian Federation entity whilst paid accounts (now renamed "professional service packages") are being handled by Live Journal Inc. Nor do they specify what Live Journal Inc. now covers.

Additionally, some of the bolded sections appear to be at odds with each other.

All in all, sketchy in the extreme, non-transparent and unhelpful to both paid and non-paid users, and even more of a reason to considering leaving LJ completely.

[dewline]

Not buying into any of it. I've decided that as of tonight, I'm done with LJ.

[ironyoxide]

Seconded.

Registered this DW account five minutes ago, will be deleting my LJ shortly. Thankfully, unlike most LJ people, I don't have 10+ years of posting history to archive or port over, so I've got it fairly easy.

[graydon]

Thirded.

[chomiji]

Someone on my reading list has suggested that under Russian law, even the mention of the existence of gay people is grounds for flagging an entry "18+".

I have no idea whether this would be true or not. This Wikipedia article implies yes. (Yeah, I know: Wikipedia. But it often makes a decent starting point.)

[dewline]

Which continues to disturb me.

My paid status at LJ has expired as of a few days ago, and having transferred my own content from "On the DEWLine" to Dreamwidth, I am now considering "torching" my LJ archives.

Updating, a few minutes later: It's done. My account is dead. I haven't (yet) torched my comments in the several communities and other users' accounts, but I understand that's still possible for the next 60 days...

How did you delete your account?

[(Anonymous)]

I've been all over LJ, and can't figure out how to burn my account (it's a free account, if that changes anything)

Sorry to bother you, but this conversation was the only place it looked like I might be able to find up to date information.

Re: How did you delete your account?

[cyprinella]

It was under account settings I think? I had to change my status from active to deleted.

[jessie_c]

By that interpretation, my entire journal is illegal in Russia because I dare to exist in spite of their laws.

Poor Vlad. When is he going to learn that wishing things away doesn't make them magically vanish?

[dewline]

When he can't order people to be disappeared anymore and realistically expect the order to be obeyed.

[kaffyr]

I suspect he knows and doesn't care; it's all grist for his power mill.

[dewline]

And so long as Aleksandr Dugin is still whispering in Steve Bannon's ear as well as Putin's, and Bannon passes the whispers on to DT-45...well...

[kaffyr]

Sadly agreed.

[harvey_rrit]

You just have to agree to it to find out....

[movingfinger]

It means they've made it much more difficult to delete posts...

[jamoche]

LJ had also decided that my mac.com email address was "invalid" because of "errors" sending mail to it, and despite having no problems getting email from LJ's bug system (nothing beyond the confirmation mail, though), no validation emails went to it or any of the other domains Apple has as aliases. While I did find an old account I could give them, that was about enough to push me away from LJ and this is the final straw.

The Apple support person I got wouldn't even consider the possibility that they might block certain IP addresses, even though any sane provider will do so as part of their spam fighting. So I've no clue what caused one of the biggest ISPs to become persona non grata to our new Russian overlords.

[kjn]

One impression I get is that per the user agreement, by simply reading it you've agreed to it.

Anyway, I just did another import of LJ comments to Dreamwidth, and it seems that you have to agree to the new user agreement in order for the import to work.

[cyprinella]

You've got to agree in order to do anything. I had to in order to delete my account. :/

[dewline]

Yep. Exactly that.

Commenting after switch

[(Anonymous)]

From Riderius on the old LJ.

I used to comment a lot on the old LJ, but I didn't have an account - I used Twitter to login. I've revoked LJ's app access to my Twitter account, but DW does not seem to have an option to establish my identity the same way, and I don't have a DW account or OpenID. I'm not sure how to maintain continuity of identity, or even how the commenting system here works--it looks like anonymous comments are screened, which is presumably more work for the blog owner.

Any suggestions? I'd rather not create a new social media account just to comment here.

[onyxlynx]

Remember long ago you jokingly asserted the existence of a Vice President in charge of Driving People to Dreamwidth?

That person just got a promotion and a raise.

[snarp]

This article indicates that the "important part" maybe have been the ban on political fundraising (line 9.2.7), which it theorizes is related to Putin's administration's recent efforts to hamstring opposition fundraising.

The line that I'm worried about is actually 9.2.6, though! "The User may not without the Administration’s special permit, use automatic scripts (bots, crawlers etc.) to collect information from the Service and/or to interact with the Service." Gosh.

The thing that troubles me personally is that, if they're serious enough about this to edit robots.txt to reflect it, the Wayback Machine's archive of LJ disappears. But there are obviously a lot of other fun consequences, like LJ being removed from Google's search results, the ban on backup/export utilities, etc.

(I actually just made an actual post about this here - what is the world coming to.)

[bolindbergh]

This is what jumped out at me:

12.5 The Administration may send to User information related to the Service as well as third-party advertising using the email address provided by User.

License to spam?

[kathmandu]

Yes, read to me like "all the third-party spam they feel like sending you". Surprised that didn't stand out to more people.