On 2 December, SUP announced the first Fifty And Fifty Day Plan for its new acquisition, Livejournal. In the interests of fairness, justice, intellectual honesty, and other even-handed concepts that are completely alien to the ruling cliques in Russia, we have refrained from commenting until the 100 days expired.
The 100 days expired to-day, 11 March. This is our view of progress against the targets SUP set itself, against the Five Tests we proposed for Livejournal in June 2005, and the Implicit Zeroth Test we made explicit six months later.
Usability:
* Improve user-friendliness of home and portal pages
No changes have been observed. A new icon has been introduced for posts subject to a custom security group, but this is only available to customers using certain display styles. We have not seen it.
* Optimize navigation
No changes have been observed. A follow-up post on or about 20 December promised alterations to the (javascript-dependent) rich text editor, customised profiles, and an additional layout. None of these have been put to live.
* Enhance the registration process
No changes have been observed. In particular, Livejournal still discriminates against the blind by using a CAPTCHA test, insists that new registrants enter their date of birth, and retains this information for all customers. This last process breaches EU data protection regulations, as it retains data after completion of the purpose for which it is required.
Socialization [sic] and discovery:
* Improve tagging and flagging (e.g. commercial or offensive content)
A limit to the number of different tags has been imposed, making tagging less specific. Small amendments have been made to the process of objecting to journal content, but the process has not been abolished, and there are still rumblngs that the system has been introduced to allow the pro-Poutine forces to squelch dissent. Commercials are still in place on the site, and methods to object to commercial content have not been re-introduced following their removal during 2007.
* Improve internal messaging
No changes have been observed.
* Create friend discovery and invitation features
An "explore LJ" page appeared. This attempts to take public posts, put them into a small number of categories, and present them to the wider world. It appears that the categories are determined by an automated process, which explains why a discussion on Taksin Shinawat's ownership of Manchester City FC was placed in Politics, and a pro-anorexic post was placed in Entertainment. There appears to be no method for contributors to suggest their own or other people's work for this feature. This is an opt-out system, which risks taking contributors out of context; as we argued last month, context is everything
* Create widgets functionality (e.g. profile, latest posts, stats)
No changes have been observed.
* Establish a clear set of policy guidelines
Policy documents had been promised at various intervals since early June 2007, and SUP promised to have something up by 7 December. This deadline was missed. A draft policy was finally published on 7 March; it is riddled with holes, exclusions, and appears to add very little to its predecessor. SUP proposes that this document should come into effect during May. The point of contention is not so much the document as the processes adopted by the Abuse Squad and its manager, which have often been completely at variance with the published literature.
General service technology, we will:
* Work on increasing service speed and performance, including improvements in content delivery
We have not been able to adduce evidence on this matter; anecdotally, the changes we noted were for the worse.
* Work on developing a new database architecture for new and enhanced features
We have not been able to adduce evidence on this matter, and would not expect to be able to until the task is complete.
* Increase certain limits for Basic and Plus accounts
No changes have been observed.
In summary: the only visible changes are a promising but currently poor summary of what might or might not be interesting, and some very minor progress in the content we can be arsed to host documents. We do not rule out the possibility of changes at the back end.
In December, we asked, What would it take to prove to us that SUP was a better caretaker than Six Apart? Here's a summary of the points we made at the time:
- Data centre redundancy - having one copy of the data in Saskatchewan, and another in Estonia, for instance. Not happening, and it leaves Livejournal vulnerable to a single-site outage of the sort that happened twice in 2005. For a grown-up company in this day and age, it's utterly unacceptable.
- Clarification of the prevailing law - no such clarification has been made. SUP would presumably point to the Term of Service document, which states various faux-jurisdictions on the Pacific coast: the prevailing document for customers prior to Six Apart's takeover calls upon Washington, those from June 2005 refer to California.
- EU data protection principles appear to apply to EU customers wherever their data are held. This point cannot be emphasised too strongly. EU data protection commissioners have made it as clear as they can that EU residents are protected by the regulations unless they specifically authorise its transfer elsewhere. Livejournal does not include such an opt-out in its proposed term of service.
- The abuse team must be professional in operation, if not in status This has not happened. The abuse squad's term of reference has not been published, nor is there a public summary of novel casework. The proposed Abuse Policy document is still a proposal, and the proof of this pudding will be in its eating.
- Centralising discussion in one place is necessary to ensure that all interested parties can keep tabs on everything. There may be progress to report: Livejournal is getting better at using News as a central repository of information, but it still splits discussion across an absurdly large number of fora.
- SUP is bound by the Social Contract that we signed up to, and it has purchased third-hand. The company appears to disagree with this analysis. We insist that SUP releases all its code back as open source. We insist that SUP give feedback its due consideration; acknowledging dissent and explaining why it's doing X rather than not-X is the very least it can do. And we insist that SUP remove all advertisements at the earliest possible moment. None of this has demonstrably come to pass.
Of the Five Tests we proposed in 2005, nothing has happened. There is no attempt at geographic resiliance. "Friends" still conflates reading and security. There is still no meaningful documentation for S2. There is still no support for weblog aggregators. There is still, in spite of its ownership behind the intellectual curtain, no cultural acceptance that Livejournal exists outside the failed colonies.
The Implicit Zeroth Test was for Livejournal to meet reasonable standards of availability (which it is currently meeting) and privacy (which it does not). The Implicit Zeroth Test boils down to: is Livejournal trustworthy? Do we trust the site's security model, and do we trust its owners? The security model appears good, as it has done since its inception. The owners are not trustworthy; they still have close connections to the government of Mr. Poutine and whichever henchman he's placed in office this week. Mr. Poutine's regime has no time for dissent, no space for any activity that does not directly further the goal of personal enrichment for Mr. Poutine and his cronies. It is already clear that SUP's purchase of Livejournal was intended to squelch dissent and repeat the gross abuses of the Stalinist-Brezhnevite era; witness the demonstrations against opposition candidates in the recent election, organised through SUP's blogging platform.
Will the much-trumpeted Advisory Board do anything to help? SUP's nominees so far are danah boyd, researcher into teen subcultures; Esther Dyson, a self-publicist who reminds us of Richard Branson and not in a good way; Bradley Fitzpatrick, privacy-hostile geek; and Lawrence Lessig, aspirant politician and creator of the commercially-obsessed Creative Commons licensing system.
Both Mrs. Dyson and Mr. Lessig have made a special study of eastern Europe's transition from Stalinist-Brezhnevism to its local interpretation of Smithite capitalism. We also note that only Mrs. Dyson (born in Switzerland) can claim any roots outside the failed colonies; even then, her presence does not convince us that SUP wishes to consider life outside the strip between the Rio Grande and the St. Lawrence. Discussion looks set to be confined to a narrow philosophical viewpoint; it will assume that a market economy is more functional than the alternatives, it will assume that some regulation is a social good. Unless SUP's final nominee brings something radically different to the table, or the userbase manages to overcome the inevitable ballot-stuffing to elect two free-thinkers, we must doubt the Advisory Board's ability to be anything more than a sop to Californish opinion.
In conclusion
We are of the opinion that SUP is so closely linked to the Poutine regime as to be an integral part of it. SUP had a chance to demonstrate its commitment to freedom of speech by standing up for democracy in Russia, by publicly distancing itself from the policies of Mr. Poutine and his hand-picked successor. It failed to take that opportunity, and we work on the presumption that this was deliberate inaction.
Our conscience does not permit us to support SUP's policies of censorship, intimidation, bullying, and deceit. We do not support the execution of those policies, and we do not wish to fund them in any way, nor do we wish to encourage other people to fund them. SUP's aims are clearly at odds to the values we hold, and at odds to the subset of values that we hold as non-negotiable.
The status quo shall apply.
We are unable to resume posts to Livejournal so long as Livejournal's owners are in breach of the Social Contract, and so long as those owners are imposing conditions of censorship. This includes direct comments to posts on SUP-owned servers. We do expect to continue to send emails, where this is possible, and where we deem this appropriate.
We will continue to permit the Tiny version of this site's RSS feed to be syndicated on Livejournal, out of respect for the readers. Any interference with this syndication - including its censorship, or the introduction of commercials into the feed - will result in its immediate and permanent cessation.
We will continue to authenticate through our existing account so that we might read secure posts. We encourage those contributors who post securely to explore alternative methods, and we hope to lead by example.
We have recently established a Trusted blog, held on our own server space, which will contain those matters we do not wish to expose to the entire public.
We shall not provide a running commentary on the actions of SUP, Livejournal, or any affilitated product. We do expect to return to the subject at some point in the future; we cannot say when.
Addendum: Even in our wildest dreams, we didn't expect to be returning to the topic within a week.
