![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(Crossposted from Tumblr, which is the only place I'm posting/reading recently, sorry.)
here's an article about the revised ToS they released yesterday (April 4, 2017). You can read the current ToS in full here, and the previous one here. Basically, LiveJournal no longer permits political fundraising, and it's probably related to other recent efforts to mess up Putin's enemies' fundraising efforts.
So, that happened! And something else also happened, which that article doesn't mention:
...if they're actually serious about this - which seems unlikely - then this new ToS is a suicide note, because:
* This policy would remove LiveJournal from Google and other search engines' results. And yeah, it's really easy for them to make that happen - they could just alter their robots.txt file to reflect this bizarre new policy, and Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc would immediately automatically remove all results on *.livejournal.com domains.
* This policy would ban all third-party clients, including those which use the official LiveJournal API. (Which, in its current form, they'd probably have to get rid of.)
* This policy would ban all backup clients. LiveJournal doesn't have an official one, they're all third-party.
* If they're serious about it, and they edit robots.txt to reflect it, this policy would make the Wayback Machine's LiveJournal archives inaccessible. The Wayback Machine automatically blanks out all earlier archived material when robots.txt tells them to get lost.
...now, LJ does not at this point appear to have updated robots.txt, and the API does still seem to be in operation, and literally fucking hiding from Google seems a little too dumb even for them? So, I'm going to assume for the moment that they're not serious.
Nonetheless, the fact that they even put this line in there is alarming, because it indicates they're dumber than we thought!
So, I'd personally be extremely grateful if some people with a few spare terabytes of space would get copies of the Wayback Machine's LJ archives before my fucking heart gives out? That's a LOT of fucking data that could be lost if they're dumb enough to enforce this.
...how long has their HTTPS been broken, christ.
here's an article about the revised ToS they released yesterday (April 4, 2017). You can read the current ToS in full here, and the previous one here. Basically, LiveJournal no longer permits political fundraising, and it's probably related to other recent efforts to mess up Putin's enemies' fundraising efforts.
So, that happened! And something else also happened, which that article doesn't mention:
9.2.6. 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;
...if they're actually serious about this - which seems unlikely - then this new ToS is a suicide note, because:
* This policy would remove LiveJournal from Google and other search engines' results. And yeah, it's really easy for them to make that happen - they could just alter their robots.txt file to reflect this bizarre new policy, and Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc would immediately automatically remove all results on *.livejournal.com domains.
* This policy would ban all third-party clients, including those which use the official LiveJournal API. (Which, in its current form, they'd probably have to get rid of.)
* This policy would ban all backup clients. LiveJournal doesn't have an official one, they're all third-party.
* If they're serious about it, and they edit robots.txt to reflect it, this policy would make the Wayback Machine's LiveJournal archives inaccessible. The Wayback Machine automatically blanks out all earlier archived material when robots.txt tells them to get lost.
...now, LJ does not at this point appear to have updated robots.txt, and the API does still seem to be in operation, and literally fucking hiding from Google seems a little too dumb even for them? So, I'm going to assume for the moment that they're not serious.
Nonetheless, the fact that they even put this line in there is alarming, because it indicates they're dumber than we thought!
So, I'd personally be extremely grateful if some people with a few spare terabytes of space would get copies of the Wayback Machine's LJ archives before my fucking heart gives out? That's a LOT of fucking data that could be lost if they're dumb enough to enforce this.
...how long has their HTTPS been broken, christ.
