Pickled Ginger's Journal

11:52pm: LJ: The protests continue!
Fed up with the deliberate
teenibopperization of LiveJournal?

Go "sign" the petition here*.


... or rather, go there, then click thru to part 2,
as the original petition has exceeded the LJ-comment limit.

On the other hand, it's also attracted the attention
of at least one SixApart vice president. Result!

*"Sign" by posting your LJ name (past or present), your real first name
(last name requested but optional) and your e-mail address.


Many thanks to amazing LJ user intertext for the link.

1:16am: Calling all Free Speech activists
You've probably heard about the federal government's recent illegal illegal acquisition of calling records from the major phone companies. What you may not have heard of is the "Net neutrality" or "Free Internet" issue. In the words of Working Assets:

Net neutrality is what separates the Internet from cable TV. It prevents Internet service providers like AT&T/Cingular and Verizon from deciding which Web sites load first and fastest on your computer.

FreePress.net waxes a bit more ... educational on the topic:

What if AT&T blocked you from viewing your favorite podcasts and blogs? Verizon cut off your net phone because you weren't using their service? Comcast forced you to download MP3s from their store while slowing other music sites?

This threat is more real than you might think. Right now, the major communications companies are planning to discriminate against the online content and services that they don't yet control. Their executives want to boost profits by playing gatekeeper, giving preferential treatment to their own high-end services while blocking or slowing access to everyone else's.


If these media giants get their way, they'll shut down the free flow of information and dictate how you use the Internet forever.

U.S.ians who'd care to sign the FreePress.net "Defend Net Freedom" petition will find it here. The site forwards copies to the CEOs of AT&T, BellSouth, Cablevision, Comcast, Cox Communications, TW Cable and Verizon, as well as to your Congressional delegation (as determined from the submitted ZIP Code).

Such U.S.ians also might want to take a look at these long-distance and cell-phone offers, from Working Assets, the activist telephone company, and the only telephone company that is acting to defend the privacy of your phone records (WA is a party to the recent ACLU v. NSA class-action suit seeking to block illegal telephone surveillance) and to prevent service providers from gaining the power to censor the Internet.

( Details, details )

I think I'm tempted by the cell offer ...

11:44pm: Poll #25785 Contact info ~ a poll!
Open to: Friends, results viewable to: None

My RL name and snail-mail address are:

Ticky?

Clicky?

Thanks to LiveJournal GreatestJournal user yonmei for the idea. If you'd like to do the same, or post a poll for other purposes (platypus optional), the GreatestJournal poll posting center is here. Oh, and my contact info may be visible here.

1:17am: Why? Because breastfeeding is not indecent, but the way LiveJournal and SixApart have been treating users with breastfeeding icons is.

One needn't be a nursing mother to be outraged at LJ Abuse's tuptotrephophobic declation that any image that includes a micron of nipple may not be used "in places on the site where one would not reasonably expect to find sexually explicit content" -- nor to wonder, based on that criterion, whether the current ban may spread. It's okay to use breastfeeding icons, even ones that show a little nipple or aureole, in a breastfeeding community, a SixApart vice president told boob_nazis.

But what about their use elsewhere? In "places .... where one would not reasonably expect to find sexually explicit content"? LiveJournal's ban on so many images from default icons begins to seem but a brief pause (for the waxing of skis, perhaps?) part-way down a very slippery slope. Already, even images of the Madonna are not exempt.

One needn't be personally affected by the policy to be outraged at the suspension, without appeal, of users who decline to change their perfectly innocent default icons. Nor to be outraged at the rudeness and scarcity of the company's responses to customer complaints and even simple requests for clarification.

As GreatestJournal user Yonmei put it in the new GJ community BFISTD (Breastfeeding is still the default!):

What do we want?

For SixApart to pay attention. When they bought LiveJournal, Barak Berkowitz and Mena Trott claimed:

Barak Berkowitz (CEO and Chairman of Six Apart’s Board of Directors): "I think the core thing to say here is we're buying LiveJournal for LiveJournal. We're not buying it to turn it into something else. We know what LiveJournal is. The fact that we come from the community should make people convinced that we're not so naive that we don't know exactly what the community is.... The net is, users will question us, and users will be suspicious until they see what we do in real life in real action over a series of months, and we'll have to prove ourselves to them."

Mena Trott (co-founder of SixApart, creator of Movable Type, and TypePad): "We believe in communication. We're doing this because we think LiveJournal has something that's really strong with the community. We feel that that's one of things we are lacking."

Let's communicate with SixApart. They can ignore e-mails; they can ignore letters; they can probably ignore nurse-ins, though anyone who lives near enough in San Francisco, Paris, or Tokyo should definitely give it a try on Tuesday 6th June. What they cannot ignore -- what their bottom line will not let them ignore -- is a drop in numbers of the people using LiveJournal.

Livejournal Statistics record over 10 million as the total number of accounts created since 1999, but that most likely includes accounts deleted or suspended, and certainly includes accounts never used or no longer used. The actual number of active users is more accurately determined by looking at the numbers updating in last 30 days (just over one million), updating in last 7 days (just over 709 000) and updating in past 24 hours (just over 236 000).

I think we can put a dent in those figures if enough of us care enough about getting SixApart to listen.

Before the strike:
* Let SixApart know you're deleting your journal and why you're doing it. Contact information here [main e-mail: contact@sixapart.com].
* If you have a blog off LiveJournal, post about the strike there. (If you comment regularly on any blog or discussion board or mailing list that you think would be interested in the issue of public support for breastfeeding in public, why not post about the strike there, too?)
* Above all, so as not to worry your friends, make a post on your own journal to let them know that you'll be deleting your journal and why you're doing it.

To go on strike, delete your journal for Tuesday 6th June. Your comments made elsewhere will still be visible, but your name will have a strike through it. Because LiveJournal is a global community, the strike should last 48 hours: begin midnight Tuesday in Kamchatka, end midnight Tuesday in Enewetok. ... But really, if enough of us round the world delete before midnight at the start of Tuesday your time, and don't undelete until after midnight at the end of Tuesday, that should put a dent in the figures.

News releases on the dispute are available online at BlogSpot.com ("Exposing LJ Abuse ...") and ProMoM.com.

Meanwhile, many people are leaving LJ for good (voluntarily or otherwise).
* If you're one of them, check out dreamalynn's tutorial, How to Pack Up & Leave LiveJournal -- yes, you can take it with you.
* If you're one of them, or looking for one of them, check out her opt-in list of LJ refugees and their GJ identities. (GreatestJournal ~ where I have the same name as on LJ ~ appears to be the destination of choice, in part because it has agreed not to limit breastfeeding icons.)

Step Apart from SixApart on 06/06/06:
Because breastfeeding is not indecent, but LiveJournal's tuptotrephophobic treatment of breastfeeding mothers is.

12:28am: The other petition
Amnesty International's Irrepressible Info Pledge:

I believe the Internet should be a force for political freedom, not repression. People have the right to seek and receive information and to express their peaceful beliefs online without fear or interference.

I call on governments to stop the unwarranted restriction of freedom of expression on the Internet –- and on companies to stop helping them do it.

I've signed, and gone one step further, adding "irrepressible [censored] content to my LJ and GJ info pages, using a nifty little bit of code (available in four display formats) that will display "new content from our database with each load of the site".

Be irrepressible!

If you have a website or blog, help us spread the word and undermine unwarranted censorship by publishing censored material from our database directly onto your site.

The more people take part the more we show that freedom of expression cannot be repressed.

Thanks to irrepressible LiveJournal user MuninnHuginn for the link!

3:36am: Hello, world!
LJ being what it is these days, I've started moving toward activating my GJ account. For now, I'm using the same color scheme as on LJ, to ease the transition. See you around.