LiveJournal has been so plainly busted for hypocrisy and for mendacity about the elimination of Basic accounts that they have decided to admit:

The announcement last Wednesday was a mistake in regards to Basic accounts, as the change was not clearly stated, it did not allow for you to provide feedback, and went into effect immediately. Many of you have pointed out that the decision worried you less than the way it was communicated. You should have been given a voice, and you were not; we didn’t follow our own rules, and we apologize.

Of course, if they were sincere about their own rules, then they'd roll-back the change, and run through the proper procedure. But they're not sincere; they're just trying to hold onto enough of the existing user-base to lure the sorts of users in whom they see their future.

Meanwhile, Anton Nosik has engaged in an interesting mix of denial, attack, and self-contradiction in an attempt to shut-up his American critics.

BTW, for those of you who have not been informed:

LiveJournal reports a list of its most popular interests. On 6 March, LJ snuck-in a bit of code that filtered that list so that it wouldn't report bisexuality, bondage, boys, depression, faeries, fanfiction, girls, hardcore, pain, porn, sex, or yaoi as amongst these. After the filtering was discovered on 14 March, the administration was silent on the matter for days, despite many demands for explanation and for removal. The filter was removed on 17 March.

LJ spokesperson marta declares

I don't have a statement for some of your questions. I do know that it was a mistake, and not meant to be a judgment or company opinion of any kind. I will try to have better answers as the day progresses.

(Note that with her I do know that, she insinuates that she doesn't know more than she reveals. We may thus be fairly sure that she knows significantly more. In any case, the administration is plainly stone-walling.)

While I am not surprised that a change to filter the popular interests would be effected in the same unannounced manner as was the change which filtered specific interest searches, and I am not surprised that something like this filtering of the list of most popular interests would eventually be effected, I am none-the-less surprised at just how quickly СУП has been moving.

Over at LiveJournal, some of the subscribers are planning a one-day boycott, to protest the elimination of Basic accounts. From Russia, we get the response of Anton Nosik:

В ситуации, когда нас пытаются шантажировать и запугивать, угрожая уничтожить наш бизнес, есть бизнес-причины не награждать такой род поведения. Это не просто психология человека, который упорствует тем больше, чем грубее на него давят. Дело в том, что никогда в истории какого бы то ни было успешного предприятия успех не достигался путем покорения агрессивной недружественной воле. Никакое решение — даже самое правильное — не должно приниматься под давлением.

Было бы, наверное, правильно этот пассаж про 12 марта пересмотреть в ближайшие дни. Но с точки зрения разумной корпоративной политики теперь придется дождаться бойкота. Пусть уж он пройдет. Чтобы тема народного негодования, угроз и запугивания была закрыта. А уж после этого обсуждать проблему по существу.

which may be translated

In a situation where someone attempts to blackmail and to intimidate us, threatening to destroy our business, there is a business reason not to reward such behaviour. This is not simply human psychology, which resists more strongly the more that it is pressed. The fact is that in the history there's never been a successful enterprise whose success was achieved by submission to aggressive, hostile demands. No resolution — not even the most correct — should be made under pressure.

It would probably be correct to reconsider the change of 12 March over the next few days. But from the point of view of reasonable corporate policy now it is necessary to wait-out the boycott. Let it pass. So that the subject of popular indignation, threats and intimidation would be closed. And after this close, to actually discuss the problem.

For the full article, see Желающим предоставят пещеру in Избранное for 18 March. For one translation thereöf, see the entry of LJ account darkrosetiger for 18 March.

I think that when next one of my hosting subscriptions comes-up for renewal, I am going to migrate from FourBucks.net to AN Hosting, unless FourBucks.net introduces a more competitive package in the mean-time.

With just one domain and low traffic, the FourBucks.net entry-level package is the better buy. But it appears that when one has two or more domains to be hosted, the AN Hosting becomes the better choice.

Addendum: I will in any case continue using this domain name, and the change should be transparent to visitors.

The Woman of Interest and I each noted that our websites had been slow and unresponsive, so yester-day after-noon I contacted technical support at FourBucks.net. A technician got back to me, reporting that he’d found nothing amiss on their server but noted that our sites draw upon resources on other servers, and suggesting that perhaps the problem was there. This explanation seemed plausible, except that shortly after I received it we found that first cpanel and then simple FTP were slowing to an effective halt. When I checked a few hours later, the sites seemed to work fine more generally. So I think that our support query was vindicated.

It seems that the LJ RSS feed for this 'blog is or was broken beginning with my entry Another 'Bot-'Blog (posted 26 Feb 2008 at 17:24:32). I'm not sure what the problem is-or-was, but I do note that it uses brackets as text and WordPress makes peculiar use of brackets. I have attempted a work-around by replacing the raw brackets with HTML ampersand escape sequences, though I am doubtful that this response will fix the problem, because WordPress has otherwise demonstrated an obnoxious propensity to replace escape sequences with raw characters.

Addendum (05 March): Using escape sequences for the brackets seems to have fixed the problem.

Sprint has changed the web interface for their mobile phone service customers. Some of the changes increase functionality for the user. Others appear designed to increase security, for which increase I'm willing to sacrifice a bit of convenience.

But they got my back up by refusing to accept my last name as, well, a last name. When I removed its blank space, the name was deemed acceptable. But my last name is two words. A lot of people have multi-word last names.

It's trivial to write computer code that will tolerate spaces in last names, and we are long past the day when computing power was so dear that the cost of running such code was prohibitive. In some cases, an issue can arise because some members of a family spell the name with a space but others do not; however, it is also trivial to write code that, for various purposes, treats names as equivalent if they only vary in terms of blank spaces. (This will also creäte some problems, but these problems are a proper subset of those that would exist if people were simply forced to report their names as if they had no blank spaces.)

The fix for the Windows Bluetooth set-up problem was to select Cancel during the portion of the installation that was failing. The set-up routine would then ask for permission to reboot the system. After the system were rebooted, any attempt to use the applications from that package would cause the set-up routine to resume, and it would be able to complete successfully.

So the program was trying to do something that it couldn't do without the computer first being rebooted. It plainly should have at least suggested that much, instead of plaguing me with requests to activate the Bluetooth unit.

Anyway, I will now be more concerned to get Linux to interact usefully with the phone set by way of Bluetooth.

The 'Net is awash with pages that claim to be about how to do this-or-that in Linux, but are really only about how to do it with some peculiar flavor of Linux.

The Dell Bluetooth module arrived yester-day. Physical installation seemed to go off without a hitch, the little Bluetooth light on the case now lights-up, and my Linux installation sees the device (when it is activated).

However, the Windows program for setting-up a protocol stack isn't working. It will run for a while, doing no more than showing a little bit of disk activity, then tell me to activate the unit (by pressing Fn+F2). It doesn't seem to much matter what I do at that point, whether it be to turn the device off and back on, or just turn it off; the program repeats its unhelpful behavior.

The Windows package in which that set-up program was included is obnoxious in other ways. Although it promises otherwise, its only function after a failed or damaged installation is to remove all of the installation. And when one seeks a reïnstallation, it insists upon re-writing the firmware of the unit, which takes a fair amount of time. Partly, this is dat Ol' Debbil, software that assumes that the user is more stupid than the code.