Assorted Miscellaneous, et cetera. (Also, Cloudflare)

• I successfully managed to be a l33t h4xx0r and get my old Playstation 2 to recognize a DVD-R (after having to find someplace still selling them) the contained a homebrew launcher on it (after it turns out that there's an exploit usable in the DVD software of many Playstation 2 systems that allows for homebrew launching, which then allowed me to load up the software that installs a homebrew launcher onto a Playstation 2 memory card, but also allowed me to copy off all of my save games from said memory cards, so that if I ever get a hankering to play my game library in emulation (and I don't have the Steam versions of those games or something similar), I'll be able to use my saves from the actual games themselves and not have to replicate my progress again. Hacking your very old consoles for fun is sometimes a thing that happens, and that's fantastic. (And probably relevant for a very few number of people who aren't me.)


• There has been a sustained campaign over social media for Cloudflare, the Distributed Denial of Service protection provider (and other things they do, too) to remove as customers known troll farms, SWAT encouragers, and others who not only cheapen the discourse but do things that are actively harmful and have had harmful consequences. The most recent request is to remove KiwiFarms, who made themselves known to much of the Internet by publishing documents about the non-online identity, workplace, and other information of a trans man known to a significant part of the Internet for his opinions on various pieces of media. The consensus of the parts of the Internet that I've been in is that, regardless of your opinion of his opinions, publishing the data of someone is enabling stochastic terrorism and encouraging others to use transphobic attacks against him both online and off-line. Cloudflare's CEO, in a blog post, detailed their Acceptable Use Policy and then said the company believes that they shouldn't terminate access to users who have content they disagree with, and that they regret having done so for neo-Nazi and conspiracy theory platforms in the past, even though both of those sites and KiwiFarms have repeatedly posted content that is absolutely in violation of their AUP. Which is to say, they threw their hands up and said "we abdicate the responsibility of determining whether any of our customers are violating our AUP because we believe that all speech should be protected equally." Which, if you hang around certain parts of Library social media, will sound very familiar (and likely very frustrating) to you, because that's basically the line that a lot of public library organizations are taking in the face of suggestions and calls (and their own ethical principles) to shape their collections to contain many fewer racist, sexist, and otherwise harmful to their communities materials. It's not a complete analogy, as the public library is close enough to government that different rules probably apply, but the answer of "well, we don't censor content that's legal, even if it's distasteful" is almost always deeply unsatisfying to anyone who is looking to influence a collection, for social good or social ill.
  
  denise explains in a post about possible downtime the reasons why Dreamwidth, as a service, is migrating away from Cloudflare as a customer and it has to do with incompatibility of ethics between Dreamwidth and Cloudflare. Dreamwidth wants to keep a maximum amount of legal content on the site, but understands that doing so requires a significant amount of ethical discussion, content moderation decisions, and actively trying to help keep the site free of things that violate the acceptable use policy, even if they may not be illegal in a specific jurisdiction. And Dreamwidth has a history of sticking to those much-discussed ethical principles even when it causes financial difficulties, as there was a time where Paypal refused to provide financial services to Dreamwidth because there was content on the site that Paypal objected to. And it took a few months to find somewhere else that would accept payments and not make demands of the content presented.
  
  In short, I kind of wish I could get denise to present at ALA or something like that to explain how Dreamwidth makes their ethical decisions as a template for libraries to do the same and make things more nuanced and involved than simply "free speech, man" and shrugging, even though the legal boundaries of what can be done and what can't be done are different for a governmental entity and for a private corporation.
  
  Cloudflare's CEO did eventually report that KiwiFarms had been blocked, but did so in a manner that basically blamed the pressure campaign for causing KiwiFarms to escalate their own behavior and be even more obviously in violation of the AUP. So that's not "we think what they're doing is bad and harmful," but "the site activity contained things we thought were credible threats that we had to notify law enforcement about, and the volume of those threats increased sufficiently that we had to shut them off." And the CEO said that losing Cloudflare protection will only take the site offline temporarily, and it'll go somewhere else and reappear, so the pressure campaign really didn't do anything except agitate KiwiFarms into doing more stupid things. To that, we pick up a starfish from the beach and toss it back into the ocean. Even if the site itself doesn't disappear completely, if it becomes significantly harder to keep it online because it lacks protection, that makes it harder for the site to continue doing things that are both illegal and distasteful, and that makes things safer for everyone.
  
  Even with the deplatforming of KiwiFarms off of Cloudflare, Dreamwidth continues to want to migrate, because the blog post there still showcases how much Cloudflare is abdicating their responsibilities and is choosing not to engage with the difficult and thorny questions (and to not enforce their AUP.)


• There's other stuff going on in my life right now, but the gist of it is that I'm in that part of life where multiple years of my salary have been spoken for just to pay for what's going on now, and multiple more years are already queued to be spoken for when it comes to the next thing that has to be taken care of. It's edging into the "well, there's no fun in my future for a very long time" space, which is not the greatest for my mental health, but there's something to be said for having enough salary to be able to handle all of these things and still have a household. It just goes to show how much money is actually needed for the peace of mind of being able to handle all expenses and emergencies without worry. Redistribute the wealth of those who already have too much so the rest of us can have enough.