Slashdot Mirror

Couple of words of Internet landscape in Russia. As many of you know, Livejournal is the service of choice for most of Russian bloggers and, most importantly, the only service that is used for the political discourse. Other services like number #2 in ratings, Liveinternet.ru populated by pop-music fans and all kinds of juvenile nonsense.

On the contrary, there are many political blogs among top bloggers at the cyrillic sector of Livejournal. It interesting that the most dominant and most vocal part of political blogs are not those that advocate Western style democracy and human rights, but on the contrary are criticizing Putin from extremely right-wing position.

I am looking at blogs.yandex.ru, 5 most cited blog entries, and among number 2 (rus) is defending arrested leader of "Red blitzkrieg" by the blogger well known for his sympathies for all things Soviet.

number 3 (rus) is also on the same subject by the relatively well known lady journalist of the similar political views.

The highest ranking blog among the official politicians (#22 in the all-list) belongs to a politician who was in political leadership of Latvia at the time of breakup from the former Soviet Union and spent a lot of time undermining efforts of Latvians to gain independence. Right wing.

Blogger number 19 is a Nazi sympathizer with Russian pseudo-pagan twist.

The lefties are presented much less among top bloggers.

I am saying this because among quite diverse opposition to Putin right-wingers opposing Western style democracy and human-rights issues are dominating. If they would come to power, the situation would be even worse than at Putin's time from the Western point of view.

In the West Putin's seems like an autocrat, anti-democrat, but to THAT opposition he is a Western poodle. The most viable alternative to Putin at the hypothetical condition of free election (free from government manipulation as well as foreign financial and all other kinds of support to the "liberal" opposition) would be not much famed recently chessmaster, but people like Rogozin (Russian equivalent of Le Pen or Heider).

This might be irrelevant to the topic of censorship, but it is quite relevant to Russians.

Couple of words of Internet landscape in Russia. As many of you know, Livejournal is the service of choice for most of Russian bloggers and, most importantly, the only service that is used for the political discourse. Other services like number #2 in ratings, Liveinternet.ru populated by pop-music fans and all kinds of juvenile nonsense.

On the contrary, there are many political blogs among top bloggers at the cyrillic sector of Livejournal. It interesting that the most dominant and most vocal part of political blogs are not those that advocate Western style democracy and human rights, but on the contrary are criticizing Putin from extremely right-wing position.

I am looking at blogs.yandex.ru, 5 most cited blog entries, and among number 2 (rus) is defending arrested leader of "Red blitzkrieg" by the blogger well known for his sympathies for all things Soviet.

number 3 (rus) is also on the same subject by the relatively well known lady journalist of the similar political views.

The highest ranking blog among the official politicians (#22 in the all-list) belongs to a politician who was in political leadership of Latvia at the time of breakup from the former Soviet Union and spent a lot of time undermining efforts of Latvians to gain independence. Right wing.

Blogger number 19 is a Nazi sympathizer with Russian pseudo-pagan twist.

The lefties are presented much less among top bloggers.

I am saying this because among quite diverse opposition to Putin right-wingers opposing Western style democracy and human-rights issues are dominating. If they would come to power, the situation would be even worse than at Putin's time from the Western point of view.

In the West Putin's seems like an autocrat, anti-democrat, but to THAT opposition he is a Western poodle. The most viable alternative to Putin at the hypothetical condition of free election (free from government manipulation as well as foreign financial and all other kinds of support to the "liberal" opposition) would be not much famed recently chessmaster, but people like Rogozin (Russian equivalent of Le Pen or Heider).

This might be irrelevant to the topic of censorship, but it is quite relevant to Russians.

Couple of words of Internet landscape in Russia. As many of you know, Livejournal is the service of choice for most of Russian bloggers and, most importantly, the only service that is used for the political discourse. Other services like number #2 in ratings, Liveinternet.ru populated by pop-music fans and all kinds of juvenile nonsense.

On the contrary, there are many political blogs among top bloggers at the cyrillic sector of Livejournal. It interesting that the most dominant and most vocal part of political blogs are not those that advocate Western style democracy and human rights, but on the contrary are criticizing Putin from extremely right-wing position.

I am looking at blogs.yandex.ru, 5 most cited blog entries, and among number 2 (rus) is defending arrested leader of "Red blitzkrieg" by the blogger well known for his sympathies for all things Soviet.

number 3 (rus) is also on the same subject by the relatively well known lady journalist of the similar political views.

The highest ranking blog among the official politicians (#22 in the all-list) belongs to a politician who was in political leadership of Latvia at the time of breakup from the former Soviet Union and spent a lot of time undermining efforts of Latvians to gain independence. Right wing.

Blogger number 19 is a Nazi sympathizer with Russian pseudo-pagan twist.

The lefties are presented much less among top bloggers.

I am saying this because among quite diverse opposition to Putin right-wingers opposing Western style democracy and human-rights issues are dominating. If they would come to power, the situation would be even worse than at Putin's time from the Western point of view.

In the West Putin's seems like an autocrat, anti-democrat, but to THAT opposition he is a Western poodle. The most viable alternative to Putin at the hypothetical condition of free election (free from government manipulation as well as foreign financial and all other kinds of support to the "liberal" opposition) would be not much famed recently chessmaster, but people like Rogozin (Russian equivalent of Le Pen or Heider).

This might be irrelevant to the topic of censorship, but it is quite relevant to Russians.

Couple of words of Internet landscape in Russia. As many of you know, Livejournal is the service of choice for most of Russian bloggers and, most importantly, the only service that is used for the political discourse. Other services like number #2 in ratings, Liveinternet.ru populated by pop-music fans and all kinds of juvenile nonsense.

On the contrary, there are many political blogs among top bloggers at the cyrillic sector of Livejournal. It interesting that the most dominant and most vocal part of political blogs are not those that advocate Western style democracy and human rights, but on the contrary are criticizing Putin from extremely right-wing position.

I am looking at blogs.yandex.ru, 5 most cited blog entries, and among number 2 (rus) is defending arrested leader of "Red blitzkrieg" by the blogger well known for his sympathies for all things Soviet.

number 3 (rus) is also on the same subject by the relatively well known lady journalist of the similar political views.

The highest ranking blog among the official politicians (#22 in the all-list) belongs to a politician who was in political leadership of Latvia at the time of breakup from the former Soviet Union and spent a lot of time undermining efforts of Latvians to gain independence. Right wing.

Blogger number 19 is a Nazi sympathizer with Russian pseudo-pagan twist.

The lefties are presented much less among top bloggers.

I am saying this because among quite diverse opposition to Putin right-wingers opposing Western style democracy and human-rights issues are dominating. If they would come to power, the situation would be even worse than at Putin's time from the Western point of view.

In the West Putin's seems like an autocrat, anti-democrat, but to THAT opposition he is a Western poodle. The most viable alternative to Putin at the hypothetical condition of free election (free from government manipulation as well as foreign financial and all other kinds of support to the "liberal" opposition) would be not much famed recently chessmaster, but people like Rogozin (Russian equivalent of Le Pen or Heider).

This might be irrelevant to the topic of censorship, but it is quite relevant to Russians.

I couldn't agree more. I've written a more extended assessment elsewhere, but it really comes down to this:

Microsoft has no other ambition than blocking access to any other operating system. They want Windows everywhere, all the time. Their entire strategy is contingent on the ubiquity of the Windows platform. The XO laptop is one of the most significant threats to their hegemony, and for once they're forced to fight on someone else's turf. Having to eat crow and announce XP support for the XO laptop is a huge concession to make.

• 8.42 : is currently *being* released, links are not updated everywhere. But a few google request may bring you to forums where it is already available. For exemple, Phoroinix have published a link to the driver they did test. I think the release is not official yet because of the reported problems with 2.6.23 kernel. The same google search can also bring out patches to circumvent those problems and even howtos about using the new AIGLX for desktop compositing.
• 8.41 : Is the previous release. It was mainly centered around bringing RadeonHD support on linux. Thus some bugs may have managed to slip by with older chipsets. IT IS available on the ATI website. But it comes with a caveat explaining the situation, that this driver is mainly targeting Radeon HD and that it's "use at your own risk" with previous chipset generations. You're still free to try it on X800XL if you want (Phoroinix did it in their).
• 8.40 : is the latest release using the older code base. Currently it is what has been the most widely tested and debugged for older chipset, so that's why it's the first thing you land on.
• There's a nice wiki about ATI on Linux, with distro specific pages, links to the latest bleeding edge versions and such.

TFA is about the current closed source ATI drivers, (the one downloadable from AMD's website).

The GP was speaking about the opensource drivers, which is a different project. Anyway, AMD/ATI has promised to help them too, and is currently in the process of releasing specs, step by step. Currently they have provided enough information for the mode setting :
- it's now possible to switch to a 2D mode using opensource drivers. Before that, VESA was the only working solution because of important change between the Radeon 2D architecture (up to R4x0 / Radeon X850) and the Avivo 2D architecture (from R5x0 Radeon X1x00 onward).

Other specs will follow step by step. Anyway, you'll still have to wait at least 1 year befor good and stable opensource drivers for Radeon HD 2900 start to popup in your favorite Linux/BSD distro. The good news from today's article is that until then the current closed source drivers are ratter good.
And AMD is promising to keep releasing specs for the opensource drivers project.

...this is not an open-source driver.

There are three ATI drivers. There is fglrx, which is this driver that was just released. There is radeon, which is the open-source driver that controls Rages, R200s, R300s, and R400s. And there is radeonhd, which controls R500s and R600s.

fglrx has many issues. It now has AIGLX, but it still has broken XComposite. Xvideo doesn't work for many people. Direct 3D rendering is slower than on Windows. The entire driver is closed-source and shims a binary blob into the kernel. But, it still offers 3D for R400, R500, and R600 chipsets.

radeon is the dependable open-source driver for older Radeon-based and Rage-based cards. It works excellently, with direct rendering for all chipsets up to the R200 series. People are working on R300/R400 direct rendering right now; see http://tirdc.livejournal.com/ .

radeonhd is a brand-new open-source driver that controls new R500 and R600 cards. It has no direct rendering yet, but there is a promise from ATI/AMD that documents pertaining to direct rendering will be released sometime soon without NDA. This driver is still being worked on, but it offers satisfactory 2D for many people.

Queue Alex Jones/Jack Blood/HAARP/what-have-you conspiracy theory whacknut gobbledegook in 3... 2... 1...

PS: How very funny and appropriate... the CAPTCHA word to verify this post is "masonry". The Illuminati are on to m... [NO CARRIER]

http://pics.livejournal.com/mkblack/pic/0002er3w

Yeah, but Automatix can be dangerous, and it's poorly-coded too. According to that site, it's full of bad assumptions (for example, what looks like an attempt to see if you're authorized to run a command with sudo assumes that sudo won't prompt you for a password twice within 15 minutes, which is a problem for me since I prefer to have it always prompt me for a password).

Ironically, the items I brought were regarding users who were making demonstrably good edits, even if they got into disagreements with other users.

What happens on Wikipedia when one user has an asshole admin buddy and the other doesn't? The asshole admin finds a way to get them railroaded. It's easy enough to do. In one case, a good user has been tarred and feathered, was falsely accused of being the same person as a demonstrably different troll, and since then a group of asshats has claimed to have found "sockpuppets" every few months, so that they can keep bumping the ban time back.

Bottom line is that the 1-year "ban" given to the user on false pretenses was already bad enough; during the time the user was still making useful edits, a group of known trolls and asshats were harassing them and slandering their user page. One even went so far as to abuse his admin powers by tagging the user page after another admin had PROTECTED it.

The end result? An illegitimate "ban" that was supposed to expire in 2006 is now extended halfway through 2008, thanks to the continued abuse and lies of the asshats and their cronies.

That's all too common of wikipedia. Administrators abuse someone, harass them, drop a spurious "block", and then abuse them more and lock userpages / talk pages in order to prevent them from exercising their right to a legitimate review.

Parker Peters called it "Scarlet Letter" harassment. I've seen the same term used from time to time on WP:ANI to describe it.

Admins on Wikipedia lie all the time. They lie about what they're doing. They lie about their edits. They purposefully abuse their powers to harass people, trying to get a reaction that they can then "block" for. And the worst part is they do it for the reason of control: it's the easiest way to drive away anyone who disagrees with the POV/propaganda they and their friends want to push.

I remember from my teenage years how EA used to be a name you could rely on for a fun game. Now, they're a shambling zombie force that sucks the life out of anything they touch, and causes their newly assimilated zombie-children to spew foul darkness onto the marketplace.

If you treat your staff like slaves, that's what you get.

I haven't bought an EA game in years, but I've very much enjoyed several Bioware ones. I fear those days are over.

It's the internal conflicts, navel-gazing and meta editing that is killing Wikipedia.

In other words - the abusive administrators and longstanding POV groups are finally driving so many people off of the project that they get to make it what they want to make it, nothing but a propaganda disaster.

Then again, they've shown how it goes time and again. I even had an experience in a Wiki administrator on Slashdot claiming he'd "look into" any reasonable issues - instead, he did exactly jack crap, kept whining about how the issues I brought were "old" or "nobody else would look at them." He eventually bailed from wikipedia completely because of all the stupid bullshit that's involved in wikipedia.

If you look at the history of railroaded users who tried to fix wikipedia from within the system, and instead were tarred as "trolls" and worse by the established assholes and POV pushers of the admin "community", you get an idea of what wikipedia really is.

Best quote ever:
Because this is precisely the goal of the abusive administrators. They want, no, need, to drive away anyone new who disagrees with them, because if they did not, then ultimately they bear the risk of enough new users coming in to overturn their bogus "consensus" on the articles they control.

After having RTFA, I'd say that the author knows what he talks about. And with techniques he described, the may have a chance to achieve an unprecedented level of computer GO.
Yet, this unprecedented level would steel be far behind real good players because while techniques described in the article can give the program overwhelming tactical advantage(and even tactics are hard to program in GO), it would steel lack deep strategy skills.
For example, the article talks about how vital is to be able to solve tsumego(live and depth) problems. Sure, in a top level game, loosing a group in a tactical battle without compensation usually costs the game, but when you play against some one way stronger than you on when it comes to global strategy, you still have to be able to take advantage of your tactical dominance and this is the very thing the program will lack no mater how strong and fast.
The fact is that in chess, because of smaller board and shorter games. tactics and strategy are more related each to other and in go. This gap is *the* difficulty of go, for programs and humans alike.
Below is a link to an article that may be of interest in this context: how far are top professional Go players from perfect play. http://bax-myx.livejournal.com/1212.html Disclaimer: I found this text file on IGS years ago but could not find it online anymore, that's why I've put in on livejournal.

fixed link

IMHO, for reasons of locality I think the no shared state model generally wins. The shared state models all involve lots of shuffling around of things between different caches under the hood, and that takes time. I wrote a couple of LJ entries on this:

• Summary on why I think shared memory schemes aren't the right idea most of the time.
• Earlier long unfocused ramble on why I think shared memory schemes are the right idea most of the time.

IMHO, for reasons of locality I think the no shared state model generally wins. The shared state models all involve lots of shuffling around of things between different caches under the hood, and that takes time. I wrote a couple of LJ entries on this:

• Summary on why I think shared memory schemes aren't the right idea most of the time.
• Earlier long unfocused ramble on why I think shared memory schemes are the right idea most of the time.

Forget about the extinction of human languages, none of us speak 'em anyway! Let's all take a moment to reflect on the shocking death of so many beloved programming languages...

When was the last time you came across BASIC in the wild? You know, 100 PRINT "HELLO" 200 GOTO 100? None of that mongrel "Visual" junk! How about Turbo Pascal? Or 68000 assembly language? To say nothing of rare species, like INTERCAL!

Heck, even a language that's near and dear to my Linux-geek heart is dying: Perl. The reason? Too ugly to reproduce, a situation that we here on Slashdot can all understand!! Perl may flash the $dollar $signs $all $$over $the{$place}, but let's face it... the ladies are going for Python these days. With its clean-cut good looks and plethora of web frameworks, Python is just irresistible. To say nothing of Ruby, Perl's one-time protégé which has now become the coolest kid in town.

Yes, folks, though it grieves me to say so, Perl is dying in my heart. The other day, I quietly shed a tear when I realized it was nothing more to me than a way to run one-liner regular expressions from the shell prompt :'(

The universe tends toward maximum irony. Don't push it. ...Do a backup onto [a third] drive...take that to your office and lock it in a desk. Every few months, bring it home, do a backup, and immediately take it away again. This is your "my house burned down" backup.

- jwz on backups, 29 Sep 07.
http://jwz.livejournal.com/801607.html

I guess you could call that "my shit got stolen" backup, too. Maximum irony, indeed.

Here's a similar proposal for distributed, extensible, language-neutral spreadsheets! Someone at Google, please implement this? Cheers!

I had a similar problem. I eventually solved it when a new subdivision went in about a half mile from our farm. Comcast wired the subdivision, but wanted many thousands of dollars to extend it on to our farm. So I rented a shelf in the garage of one of my new neighbors and got Comcast service to the shelf. Then using a couple Proxim Tsunami radios, I setup a wireless link from my neighbor's garage to one of my farm fields. Using Power Over Ethernet, I was able to string an ethernet cable out to the antenna and radio in the field through a couple of my greenhouses. It could probably have been done cheaper, but since my business depends on reliable service that I didn't have to muck about with it very much, I went commercial. I blogged about it and posted some photos when I finished the project: "The New Internet Connection"

Yes, of course, "everyone" knows it is true. I'd like, just once, even one example of this.

Yes and I would like, just once, an example of the common myth that water is wet.

Yet, I am loathe to let you wallow in your ignorance, so I've done a quick search for you. I follow gnome development only from a distance, so I'm sure I've missed a lot here.

The menu editor, removed somewhere in the 2.x cycle, not replaced until years later: http://www.linux.com/articles/57088
Sawfish replaced with Metacity, losing tons of features/configurability. http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usability/2002-December/msg00069.html
Galeon 1.2 replaced with Galeon 1.3, losing features, and then later replaced with Epiphany, losing more features.
http://wouterverhelst.livejournal.com/46098.html
xscreensaver replaced with gnome screensaver, which has no options at all https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-screensaver/+bug/22007

And an example where important features are intentionally not implemented for usability reasons:
https://lists.linux-foundation.org/pipermail/desktop_architects/2005-December/001587.html

There are many more, this list was just the product of a quick google search

Some time ago there was some talk about reimplementing tomboy in c++. But I don't know what happened to that project (nor the code) http://jasondclinton.livejournal.com/52994.html#comments

Automatix (the software to install programs - right?) should get a huge mention

Wrong, and wrong.

First, Automatix is not "the software to install programs". That's Synaptic (in menu System|Administration) or, if you want it easier, menu Applications|Add/Remove Software. (Or, if you want command line, apt-get or aptitude).

Second, Automatix is a piece of crap that breaks installs: http://mjg59.livejournal.com/77440.html

http://mjg59.livejournal.com/77440.html

You should be recommending Easybuntu or preferably Medibuntu. With Medibuntu, you just switch on universe and mulitverse and restricted, copy/paste the Medibuntu source lines into the package manager, then install w32codecs and libdvdcss. Upgrades then won't cause your system to self destruct.

The system will work with multimedia at this point.

That leaves one remaining hurdle, the video driver for 3D games. I agree that Dell could have taken care of this detail, but what are they going to do when the kernel gets upgraded and the video goes *poof* ? Sounds like a tech support nightmare. Forgetting about games support seems acceptable for the time being.

Automatix is BAD!

He didn't even mention Automatix or Easy Ubuntu at all.

He didn't even mention Automatix or Easy Ubuntu at all.

With good reason. First of all, Dell does ship them. And Automatix, at least, is still crap: http://mjg59.livejournal.com/77440.html

You are right. This is as per design in python2.6 (and below) and I dont know if addition of () is removing this feature in py3k, in which case, it is a welcome move.
The 2.6 (and below) language reference says that print is designed to output a space before any object. And some search goes to find and that is controlled by softspace attribute of sys.stdout.
Way to print without leading space is using sys.stdout.write()

I have kept a note for myselfhere.

John C Wright

There is a whole emerging literature documenting anomalous mental-physical interactions, up to and including religious/mystical experiences. Irreducible Mind is a textbook-quality tome which is expensive, but a good place to start.

The evidence of the honestly miraculous is out there, if you choose to look. A word of warning, though, if you do decide to investigate this stuff, it will get inside your head.

ATI hasn't announced anything new. They've simply brought attention to the fact that they will support open source efforts, as they always have.

As always, there will be 3d drivers for paleolithic versions of their cards, and 2d for everything else. If you actually want to use up to date cards, you'll have to use the closed drivers.

It's also old news.

The SELinux guys debunked it over a month ago.

Rich.

Some BitTorrent caching at the ISP level is already taking place: http://bramcohen.livejournal.com/29886.html ("Third"...)

Bzzzz - wrong.

Read David's blog - http://airlied.livejournal.com/ - there are a whole pile of potential problems about that driver. David accepts that it was on questionable ground, and so it will probably never see the light of day.

This is occurring

I'm going to take that out. My point here is that the fork has occurred at the GPLv2 point. If the GPLv3 is considered too onerous, it is entirely possible that the GPLv3 code could never be merged.

I'm also not going to argue that the compiler front-end isn't complex and difficult to replace -- of course it is. I don't personally think there's much value in a re-implementation. That said, I do believe that LLVM provides a potential migration path away from the GPL, if corporations with sufficient resources deemed such a migration to be worthwhile.

This is occurring

This is occurring -- see LLVM and LLVM-GCC. Several corporations are contributing to LLVM -- including Apple

The open source iPhone development tools currently use LLVM with the GCC front-end. In this case, the gcc driver is used to interface with LLVM, and output LLVM byte-code. LLVM handles the assembly/linking of this byte code as a native executable. The GCC driver simply provides a fully GCC-compatible front-end -- it can (and has been) forked from GPLv2 licensed gcc, and in theory, could be maintained in perpetuity as a fork -- or potentially replaced outright.

What about LOL Cats site?

What about Live Journal?

Bah! I only read Slashdot and Ghastly's Comic. And Ghastly hasn't been updating lately. I have no life.

In his Thoughts about the Palm Foleo post kernel hacker extraordinaire Ted Ts'o critiques the device and there is even a follow up comment from a Palm employee on there.

Hi,

I could imagine some simulation tools could be usefull. Take a look at http://cniehaus.livejournal.com/41381.html, for example. It demonstrates the possiblilies offered by Step (http://edu.kde.org/step/), the new KDE physics simulator.

Livejournal alone has 3.4 million users [livejournal.com]. This and many other social networks can be called blogs.

IP sucks. Its never as simple as you think.

IP sucks because it doesn't exist.

Look, you either have an object, which is patentable, a work, which can be copyrighted, a symbol, which can be trademarked... or you have an idea, which is only protected until you tell somebody else. If you don't want to share, don't.

The concept of Intellectual Property - i.e. the idea that an abstract construct can have the same properties as a physical construct - is self-contradictory: If it's intellectual, it's not property. The idea has no basis in law, philosophy or history. I've written about this elsewhere, so I won't waste my breath repeating myself here.

As far as the submitter is concerned, the alternatives are clear: You can protect the work, but not the idea. If it's a song, write it down and/or record it, then copyright it. If it's software, put it in a public repository that has reliable tracking and timestamping, and associate it with an appropriate license. As the owner, you can change this license any way you like in the future, so pick something that suits you for the time being and leave it at that.

I can see how the sci fi writers would use this tool after repeated attempts at other eforts to have their still owned works taken down... with limited or NO success. I think Jerry Pournelle ... who was one of those who requested this actions sums it up clearly, honestly and completely.

If Scribd have procedures other than those prescribed by the DMCA, then Scribd is once again in the wrong.

According to the SWFA Livejournal site, no DMCA notice was issued to Scribd, so, in this case, I think Jerry Pournelle should stop whining and use the existing procedues and laws available to him.

A poster on the LJ SFWA group explained the situation much better than I could ever hope to do:

"Just to clarify. This letter, sent by Andrew Burt, seems not to be a DMCA notice as a DMCA notice requires some specific statements as to the agent's representation of a copyright holder, which this letter lacks. Indeed, this letter is obviously written as part of a longer back and forth correspondence between Burt and someone at Scribd.

However, in this subsequent letter, Burt falsely claims that the first letter linked was in fact not an "idle musing, but a DMCA notice."

Since the criticism of these letters emerged, we have been told that, in fact, SFWA never sent Scribd a DMCA takedown notice. This is correct.

In other news, I just got a tin deputy badge from a box of Crackerjacks and will be placing some parking tickets I just printed out on my home computer on the windshields of cars on my block. If anyone receiving the ticket asks, yes I am authorized to hand out these tickets and they are real tickets, the fines from which I will collect. If these real tickets get me into trouble, then they are not real tickets and anyone suckered by them is to blame for his own foolishness.

Is that all clear now?"

Basically, after the "interests" screw-ups, LiveJournal made certain reassurances to the users, prior to trying to sell them permanent accounts. The left telling them "oh, we'll ban users on sight for sexually explicit drawings of under 18s, based solely on what age we reckon they are" until after the permanent account sale was on.

They can hardly say they didn't know about it or didn't realise users would want to know this before they shelled out $150 - there's this thread in response to their initial reassurances (barakb25 is their CEO). Also, the first two banned users got in trouble for posts to pornish_pixies, which was one of the communities suspended in the previous screw-up.

While it may not be government censorship, I don't see why we can't publicly decry these actions as idiotic.
After all, who will learn from their example if no one makes an example of them?

Anyone can be a flaming hypocritical asshat, but that won't make an example of anyone. It's more or less the same as the WoW forums (as well as EQ forums, DAoC forums and any other main-stream MMO game in it's hayday). All you get is a bunch of idiots yelling "F!U Bliztards! I KNOW GAZ!LL!ON PEOPLE WHO ARE LEAVING BEKAZ OF NEW CANGE"

Just RTF synopsis and some of these /. asshat comments.

Today, LiveJournal management have demonstrated a serious lack of understanding in how the internet works

What an incredibly stupid and sensationalist remark. Yes, lets think. The people who built and manage a fairly popular website (incredibly popular compared to most of the internet sites out there) have no clue how the Internets work. It's just a series of tubes to them. Of course, I'll believe whatever you(the quoter) say and just because you(the quoter) said it! Of course, their reasoning for it is even worse.

declaring that users are responsible for the content of the webpages that they link to in their blog entries

Yes, more sensational bullshit. I didn't see the LJ TOS specifically say that you are responsible for the content of another website. What I did read is as follows..

XIV.JOURNAL CONTENT

You agree to follow the following guidelines for posting Content to your online journal:

1. All Content posted to LiveJournal in any way, is the responsibility and property of the author. LiveJournal is committed to maintaining the Service in a manner reasonably acceptable to all audiences but is not responsible for the monitoring or filtering of any journal Content. Within the confines of international and local law, LiveJournal will generally not place a limit on the type or appropriateness of user content within journals. Those users posting material not suitable for all audiences must agree that they are fully responsible for all the Content they have posted anywhere on the Service. Should Content be deemed illegal by such law having jurisdiction over the user, you agree that LiveJournal may submit all necessary information to, and cooperate with, the proper authorities;
2. Should any Content that you have authored be reported to LiveJournal as being offensive or inappropriate, LiveJournal might call upon you to retract, modify, or protect (by means of private and friends only settings) the Content in question within a reasonable amount of time, as determined by the LiveJournal staff. Should you fail to meet such a request from LiveJournal staff, LiveJournal may terminate your account. LiveJournal, however, is under no obligation to restrict or monitor journal Content in any way;
3. LiveJournal claims no ownership or control over any Content posted by its users. The author retains all patent, trademark, and copyright to all Content posted within available fields, and is responsible for protecting those rights, but is not entitled to the help of the LiveJournal staff in protecting such Content. The user posting any Content represents that it has all rights necessary to post such Content (and for LiveJournal to serve such Content) without violation of any intellectual property or other rights of third parties, or any laws or regulations;

XVI. MEMBER CONDUCT

You understand that all Content, including without limitation, all information, data, text, software, music, sound, photographs, graphics, video, messages, or other materials, whether publicly posted or privately transmitted, are the sole responsibility of the person from which such Content originated.{snip}

13. [you cannot] Promote or provide instructiona

The thing is, their policy doesn't exactly "clearly state that". More specifically, they're saying they'll ban users (presumably under the clause of the ToS prohibiting the uploading and transmission of unlawful or obscene content) for content that's not uploaded to LiveJournal and not necessarily unlawful or obscene.

Also, their statement was in a semi-obscure community that's not followed by most users - only the users who have been paying close attention know about it, and most of them probably don't have time to go back through every past entry and check there's nothing that could get them banned.

They don't have any user-visible policy document stating what's not allowed, either, so any new user wanting to know the rules would have to somehow find lj_biz (which isn't particularly well publicised) and read through their past statements.

"Many of you might remember the previous story about LiveJournal erroneously deleting hundreds of users as suspected paedophiles, spurred on by pressure from the group, Warriors for innocence. Since then, they've been taking action against users hosting material on their servers that they believe to be illegal."