KJ

Fun times with the Internet

Sat, 14 May 2016 19:01:09 GMT

So if you follow my Twitter (iamkj), you probably saw that I got locked out of my Tumblr account for a couple of days. Basically, Tumblr had a password security breach in 2013, and they forced the affected accounts to change their passwords. (I'm not quite sure why a breach of three-year old data necessitates a password change today. Maybe they just now found out about it?) Mine was one of those accounts, so I attempted to reset my password, multiple times, without receiving a verification email.

It turns out the problem was on my end -- the email I use for Tumblr is connected to my personal domain name, and the registration had lapsed -- so as far as that goes, this isn't Tumblr's fault. But if I hadn't been able to get my email fixed, I would have had no recourse, because Tumblr doesn't provide any alternate method of identity verification. When I wrote to Tumblr about the problem, their only suggestion was to register a new account with a different email address and start over.

Dear Tumblr staff: this solution is not a solution at all. In fact, it is completely unacceptable. I understand taking security seriously -- I wouldn't want just anyone to be able to pretend to be me, either. But there are ways around this, ways used by many other sites. Offer a back-up method of account verification, such as a secondary email or mobile phone number. Allow your support staff to exercise their judgement and/or common sense in cases like mine and Bryan Konietzko's (read the sad story here). There are all kinds of reasons why someone might lose access to an email account. Maybe you signed up with a work email and then changed jobs; maybe you graduated from college and your school doesn't provide permanent forwarding; maybe your email host went out of business; maybe someone hacked your account and you had to close it... This is a common enough situation that there needs to be some solution beyond having to close your blog and move on.

Move on?? I've been actively curating my Tumblr blog for over 5 years. I have more than 400 followers. I'm a contributor to several side blogs, including two for which I'm the only admin (so those blogs would have been lost, too). I suppose the content would stay up, but the chance to build on it and continue participating in conversations would be lost. And if it can happen to me, it can happen to others (see above), with far more followers and influence than I. Make your site unsustainable to use in the long term, provide poor customer service, and people will move on, all right -- they'll move on to a new blogging platform.

Fix this, Tumblr. Even if it's too late for people like Bryan to regain access to their accounts, please move into the modern era and implement some sort of back-up authentication method. It's absolutely necessary.

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LB post on my least favorite response to discussions about representation

Thu, 03 Mar 2016 18:14:02 GMT

I posted a mini-rant on this subject to Twitter last month, but apparently I decided that wasn't sufficient:

The Tyranny of "Do It Yourself!"

As discussions about representation in media continue to grow and gain traction around the Internets and through different corners of fandom, we start seeing a lot of repetition: the same unhelpful arguments being made again and again. One of the responses I see a lot, and that I find among the most tiresome, boils down to this: "Stop complaining that other people aren't making the media you want, and just do it yourself!"

I first encountered this response in media fandom, as a pushback against people who wanted to see more content for an unusual pairing, and/or more diversity in romantic pairings (more femslash, more pairings involving people of color, etc.). It was frustrating there, but it's even more pervasive in the wider SF/F fandom, and follows many of the same patterns. And although I don't want to say that this is the very worst response to calls for diversity -- there are a lot of contenders for that title -- it's certainly up there.

Check it out!

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Petty rant

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 17:46:43 GMT

I don't know why this bothers me so much, but I am so, so tired of this idea that pronouncing "gif" as "jif" is the most ridiculous thing ever "because it starts with a G".

Giraffe, gin, ginger, gigantic, gif.

Both are legitimate pronunciations, arrived at by different linguistic reasoning, so can we please just accept that and move on, instead of flooding Tumblr with stupid text posts and macros and other nonsense?

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Google just stop

Fri, 24 May 2013 18:03:28 GMT

I would like to have something coherent to say about Google shutting down Google Talk and forcing the functionality into Google Hangouts, but right now all I've got is "Google argh bargle WHY??? [insert profanity here]"

News article about the change, more positive than I'm feeling, but at least it acknowledges my main concern: will Google stop supporting the ability to log in via a client? Because if I can't access Google's chatting function through a client (I use Adium for the most part), it becomes useless to me.

Anyone still on AIM? Any thoughts on Skype as a text-only chat service?

I still need to decide what I'm using instead of Reader, too. Goddammit Google, why are you dismantling my online life? To paraphrase a quote regarding Google's decision to take sharing out of Reader (which happened only a few months before they announced that Reader would be sunset), you aren't going to get me to use Google+ by taking away bits and pieces of the services I use. That's not how this is going down.

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30 Days: Propositioned

Tue, 16 Nov 2010 08:01:28 GMT

justira asked me to ~~rant about~~ share my opinions on California politics.

The first thing an outsider needs to know is that California is not a monolith. Like most states, we have an urban/rural divide, and it plays out pretty predictably: staunchly liberal urban areas (SF Bay Area, Los Angeles), a few conservative urban enclaves thanks to wealthy suburbanites (Orange County) and/or a strong military presence (San Diego), aging hippies and libertarians along the rural coast and in the mountains, and a solid Red State interior. So there is a sharp political divide in California, but the lines are not all drawn where you would expect them to be. There are cultural differences between Northern and Southern California, to be sure. But they don't really show up in our political discourse.

Okay, now that's out of the way, I'm going to focus on the real subject of this post: California's proposition system, and why I hate it with the fire of a thousand burning suns.

(Technically, there are three kinds of propositions: propositions, initiatives, and constitutional amendments. There are technical differences between them, but on the state ballot they are all referred to as "Proposition N" where N is the identifying number, so I will use "proposition" as a generic term throughout the post.)

( Here's the deal. )

30 Days of... Project! Complete list of questions / Ask a question on LJ or on DW.

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