After Moving Servers to Russia, LiveJournal Bans ‘Political Solicitation’
advox.globalvoices.org
advox.globalvoices.org
I guess LJ has introduced these changes because otherwise the officials would shut down the whole thing, seize all the servers and arrest the management, possibly for unrelated charges - just to make a point. It was an offer they couldn't refuse...
These people will ban the Internet before giving up power and that will probably be met with relative apathy by the population - "well, if we have to suffer for our motherland, we will...".
Of course 'motherland' has nothing to do with it - everyone knows that they are pawns in a game played by a handful who have all the power and that's a game that's been going on for centuries.
Interestingly, we, the software community, are also unknowingly giving a huge helping hand to these guys, not just in Russia, but pretty much everywhere else.
The idealistic desire for 'freedom', the main motivation behind 'free software' is actually backfiring hard right now. We've open sourced so much technology that any student can put together powerful country-wide surveillance and control systems, offering incredible powers to whoever is the alpha male around there, for free...
Technological superiority was the reason why the USSR lost the cold war, but now we've handed those people all this tech for free and are actively maintaining it - from operating systems to databases, encryptions systems, etc.
Of course we only had good intentions, who would have thought...
After the UK laptop ban on flights some people (who were British, not Russian) trotted out the old, 'well if it keeps us safe' mantra.
I don't think you can, or should, generalise about tens of millions of people as if "they" are fundamentally different to "us" somehow, or more willing to tolerate a reduction in their freedoms.
> Interestingly, we, the software community, are also unknowingly giving a huge helping hand to "these guys"
Free speech, encryption, privacy rights help bad guys too. Your argument here is pretty much how (would-be) totalitarian states put it.
> We've open sourced so much technology that any student can put together powerful country-wide surveillance and control systems, offering incredible powers to whoever is the alpha male around there, for free...
If any student can access, use, understand and modify the technology, it actually takes power away from the alpha males and puts it into the hands of less powerful people (anyone/everyone).
Don't forget all these technologies equally help fighting surveillance and control. The benefits here greatly outweigh the costs.
>we've handed those people all this tech for free and are actively maintaining it
Don't mix Russian people with their government. Many of Russian people are actively developing and maintaining all this tech.
I doubt that. More that the Russian population was fed up with the way their country was being run. And unlike then, internet access now is way more like crack than rock & roll and jeans ever was for their youth in the USSR days. The Kremlin takes it away at their peril.
- Furry, slash fandom
- Political blogs
- SEO spam (it sells usernames of deleted accounts, some of which was popular and there are lots of external links to them)
So since the first two are banned, the only use of Livejournal that remains is spam (which is ineffective for modern search engines I think).
By all appearances it seems to be used exclusively by older Gen-Xers and Russians.
I changed one word, guess which.
"Livejournal's Russian owners announce new anti-LGBT policy, fandom stages mass exodus" [1]
Edit: Oops, my apologies. I didn't realize the LGBT connection. I guess that the chan folk were predators.
9.2 User may not: ... 9.2.7 post advertising and/or political solicitation materials unless otherwise directly specified in a separate agreement between User and the Administration;
http://www.livejournal.com/legal/tos-en.bml
So it's not banned, you probably just need to pay for it.
Some other May Nots:
9.1 register a legal entity as a User;
9.2 register himself/herself as a User on behalf of another individual;
9.3 mislead Users as to his/her identity and relationships with other individuals;
On Facebook, Reddit, Youtube, Tumblr... you can pay for political ads. But you can also post political posts/content without paying. If you're blocking posting of certain types of content that's a type of censorship.
But this was the past. You know, with all the bullshit about "fake news" we now have subtle censoring of facebook, google, etc... too.