(no subject)
Please excuse the OT interruption in your regular Radio Richelieu programme for a small but significant piece of news, in the improbable case you haven´t heard yet:
Six Apart has sold Livejournal to SUP, a pro-Putin Russian media company
and
More about the possible consequences on your own data privacy.
What does this mean for Lj users?
That´s the million rouble question: your guess is as good as anyone´s.
For a start, read lj_staff´s brand new statement about their intention to monitor the "taste and decency" standards, among others, and taking into account "religious concerns". Bottom line: any information you posted or post here is now in the hands of an openly pro-Kremlin company; you may or may not trust that the privacy safeguards and guarantees which applied to the old Lj TOS when you signed up will continue to be valid. For my part, I´d rather be trusting a rabid Siberian bear on the loose.
What is certainly fact is that users of paid accounts are unwittingly paying for, and thus endorsing, the Putin policies via his SUP minion.
Meaning (just a few token samples off the top of this batty head): aggressive renewal of the armament race (you´ve heard about Putin unilaterally withdrawing just a few days ago from the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe, which is the most important binding arms control tool in Europe, Russia, the US and Canada, haven´t you?), further curtailing speech (heard of Kasparov´s arrest?), press (Anna Politkóvskaya, anyone?) and entrepreneurial freedom (Khodorkovsky, anyone?) as well as political transparency (Litvinenko, anyone?).
Now this insignificant pseudojournal (X-rated two days ago according to a few readers, for no reason as there´s absolutely no profanity or explicitness there either in public or in friends-only entries) might be one day deemed as contrary to this new "taste and decency" politik due to its mildly conservative, openly germanophile and all-out Putinphobic views, but that is nothing compared to the targeting that even more outspoken and freethinking Lj users might expect, if SUV treats Lj as it has its own media outlets after it´s taken over them.
I´m just sayin´.
Which means, pre-emptively, so long and thanks for all the ríbyi. I´ve never been really a true Lj user; my trust belongs elsewhere, to a small group of open-minded folks, a few of which I happen to know personally *waves at blanhe2*, dedicated for a long time now to set up once more an equally small and open-minded diary site tailored to the needs of its loyal community, and not the other way around. They don´t have the reach or popularity of Lj, but I know who they are, their names and addresses and the way they´ve run things so far overall, and it suits me enough to wait as long as it takes (a month or half a year?) for their efforts to bear fruit so I can move back there, virtually home again, and I hope for good.
Until then, if you notice boring anti-Putin, anti-Kremlin, anti-Neoliberal Bolshevism tirades replacing the old boring cardinalist-anarchist-atheist rambles, please humour me. As I said elsewhere, the Putin régime already has got its sticky fingers deep inside my little country´s Government jar, and damned if I support in any way whatsoever a PR tentacle of our friendly bully next door. I never wasted a cent on Livejournal, much less on Six Apart, and the only thing SUP will get of me is a stiff angry Vogel.
Enjoy my Boche-loving icons while you can *g*
Sorry for the OT interruption.