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dialecticdreamerconulythewayneysabetwordsmith
kellan_the_tabby
[The bottom half of the photo is blurry, mottled grey and black; the top is mostly white, except for a small curled bit sticking up from the center of the bottom half. It’s an extreme closeup of the top of Major Tom’s head, with about the last five inches of his tail showing behind it.]
It’s so bad it went all the way around the circular scale & registered as ‘great’.
So’s this one:
[An extreme closeup of the bottom half of Tom’s face, blurry and elongated, above his chest and front legs. He’s standing on my lap, and I’m sitting in the drivers seat of the van. There’s a lot of whiskers going on.]
& the classic ‘alien’ shot
[Tom’s moved his head down enough to block most of his front, except for his toes. Most of his face is in the shot now; it’s elongated from being too close, again, and also his eyes are very wide, and he looks like the classic grey alien, just with tabby stripes and a pink nose. Also he’s staring directly into your soul.]
The rest are just your run-of-the-mill cute cat pictures, but they’re run-of-the-mill cute cat pictures of my tomcat, & that makes them better than anyone else’s.
[Tom’s sitting fairly comfortably on my lap, looking up at a sliver of something held over his head. I think it was some kind of lunchmeat.]
We were TRYING to get him to do something for the hypothetical hilarious pictures we would hypothetically get, but that didn’t happen, because he’s a cat. But these are pretty cute.
[Tom’s stretching his head up to reach the food item between my fingers, with the result that you can see the entire neck and chin. It’s a little stretched out, not as much as the alien face pic, but okay, it does still look kinda funny.]
Finally, the epitome of dignity.
[Tom’s curled up on top of my purse, between the van’s front seats. His purple bow tie has migrated to the back of his neck, as it often does.]
… that’s my tomcat.
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Today in one sentence: Trump claimed he fired Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook; a whistleblower said Trump administration officials uploaded a copy of the Social Security database to a private cloud server that "lacks independent security, monitoring and oversight"; a Trump-appointed judge dismissed the Trump administration’s lawsuit challenging a Maryland court order that paused deportations for two business days when immigrants filed habeas petitions; the Department of Homeland Security appointed an election conspiracy theorist as deputy assistant secretary for election integrity; Trump appointed his deputy chief of staff, who manages most of his social media, to lead the White House Presidential Personnel Office; the Trump administration plans to remove COVID-19 vaccines from the U.S. market “within months”; and Trump, while meeting South Korea’s president at the White House, repeatedly praised North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong-un and said, “I’d like to meet him this year.”
1/ Trump claimed he fired Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, citing mortgage fraud allegations as “sufficient cause” for her removal. Cook, however, rejected the move, saying, “President Trump purported to fire me ‘for cause’ when no cause exists under the law, and he has no authority to do so.” Her attorney, Abbe Lowell, said they will file a lawsuit, calling the action “illegal” and one that “lacks any factual or legal basis.” No president has ever attempted to fire a Fed governor in the central bank’s 111-year history, and the law permits removal only “for cause,” a standard never defined in court. The allegations involve mortgages Cook signed in 2021, before she joined the Fed; the Justice Department has opened an investigation but has not charged her. Trump said Cook’s removal would give him a Fed “majority very shortly” to push interest rates lower, adding, “So that’ll be great.” The Fed said it would “abide by any court decision” and stressed that fixed terms and removal protections are meant to insulate monetary policy from political pressure, a safeguard economists warn is critical to U.S. financial credibility. (CNN / CNBC / CNBC / Wall Street Journal / New York Times / Washington Post / New York Times / Bloomberg / NPR / Associated Press / Politico / NBC News)
2/ A whistleblower said Trump administration officials uploaded a copy of the Social Security database to a private cloud server that “lacks independent security, monitoring and oversight.” Whistleblower Charles Borges, the Social Security Administration’s chief data officer, alleged that Department of Government Efficiency staffers risked the personal data of more than 300 million Americans when they moved the file without required oversight and despite warnings the project carried “high risk” and could cause “catastrophic impact” that “potentially violated multiple federal statutes.” Internal risk assessments said unauthorized access might force the government to reissue every Social Security number. SSA Chief Information Officer Aram Moghaddassi nevertheless approved the move, writing that “the business need is higher than the security risk” and that he accepted “all risks.” (NPR / New York Times / Wall Street Journal / Axios / TechCrunch)
3/ A Trump-appointed judge dismissed the Trump administration’s lawsuit challenging a Maryland court order that paused deportations for two business days when immigrants filed habeas petitions. Judge Thomas Cullen called the suit against all 15 Maryland federal judges “novel and potentially calamitous” and said the judges were immune, noting the administration should have appealed instead. He warned the case “would run counter to overwhelming precedent, depart from longstanding constitutional tradition, and offend the rule of law.” Cullen also condemned the White House’s rhetoric, noting top officials had called judges “rogue,” “radical,” “crooked,” and worse, which he called “unprecedented and unfortunate.” The Justice Department, however, said it would appeal and that the order is “a direct assault on the president’s ability to enforce the immigration laws.” (NBC News / Associated Press / Politico / Reuters / Washington Post / New York Times / ABC News)
4/ The Department of Homeland Security appointed an election conspiracy theorist as deputy assistant secretary for election integrity. Heather Honey, founder of PA Fair Elections, spread false claims about the 2020 election and was praised by Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who worked to help Trump overturn the 2020 results, as a “wonderful person.” Trump repeated one of her claims on Jan. 6, saying Pennsylvania had “205,000 more votes than you had voters.” (Philadelphia Inquirer / ProPublica / WITF / Democracy Docket)
5/ Trump appointed his deputy chief of staff, who manages most of his social media, to lead the White House Presidential Personnel Office. Dan Scavino will now oversee hiring and firing across the administration, replacing Sergio Gor, who was nominated last week as ambassador to India and special envoy for South and Central Asian affairs. A former Trump lawyer, who pleaded guilty in Georgia to aiding and abetting false statements about the 2020 election, told prosecutors that Scavino said in December 2020 that “the boss is not going to leave under any circumstances” and that “We don’t care, and we’re not going to leave.” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, nevertheless, promised that “Dan’s leadership will ensure the highest quality, most dedicated workforce ever.” (Politico / Washington Post / Bloomberg)
6/ The Trump administration plans to remove COVID-19 vaccines from the U.S. market “within months,” according to Dr. Aseem Malhotra, an ally of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Reportedly, Malhotra said Kennedy’s team “cannot understand” why the vaccines are still prescribed and that the administration may act in “one clean decision,” even if it brings “fear of chaos” and legal fallout. Kennedy has already cut $500 million in mRNA funding and called the COVID shot “the deadliest vaccine ever made.” Research, however, estimates that the vaccines prevented at least 3 million deaths in the U.S. and more than 14 million globally in their first year. The American Academy of Pediatrics and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists said they would keep recommending COVID shots for young children and pregnant people, while Kennedy warned doctors who defy federal guidance could lose malpractice liability protections. (Daily Beast / New Republic / Vox)
7/ Trump, while meeting South Korea’s president at the White House, repeatedly praised North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong-un and said, “I’d like to meet him this year.” Trump said they “had a very good relationship, as you remember, and still do.” Trump then offered to arrange a meeting between Kim and Lee Jae Myung, who replied that “the only person that can make progress on this issue is you, Mr. President.” Lee added that he looked forward to “construction of a Trump Tower in North Korea” and “playing golf at that place.” North Korea, meanwhile, recently dismissed Seoul’s proposals aimed at easing tensions on the peninsula and vowed to “make enemies afraid” with its “rapid expansion” of its nuclear program. (New York Times / Bloomberg / Axios)
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dialecticdreamerreadera with my thanks; it fit so perfectly into the timing of the main story that posting it for everyone to enjoy was the only logical course of action! ::
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dw_newsI'll start with the tl;dr summary to make sure everyone sees it and then explain further: As of September 1, we will temporarily be forced to block access to Dreamwidth from all IP addresses that geolocate to Mississippi for legal reasons. This block will need to continue until we either win the legal case entirely, or the district court issues another injunction preventing Mississippi from enforcing their social media age verification and parental consent law against us.
Mississippi residents, we are so, so sorry. We really don't want to do this, but the legal fight we and Netchoice have been fighting for you had a temporary setback last week. We genuinely and honestly believe that we're going to win it in the end, but the Fifth Circuit appellate court said that the district judge was wrong to issue the preliminary injunction back in June that would have maintained the status quo and prevented the state from enforcing the law requiring any social media website (which is very broadly defined, and which we definitely qualify as) to deanonymize and age-verify all users and obtain parental permission from the parent of anyone under 18 who wants to open an account.
Netchoice took that appellate ruling up to the Supreme Court, who declined to overrule the Fifth Circuit with no explanation -- except for Justice Kavanaugh agreeing that we are likely to win the fight in the end, but saying that it's no big deal to let the state enforce the law in the meantime.
Needless to say, it's a big deal to let the state enforce the law in the meantime. The Mississippi law is a breathtaking state overreach: it forces us to verify the identity and age of every person who accesses Dreamwidth from the state of Mississippi and determine who's under the age of 18 by collecting identity documents, to save that highly personal and sensitive information, and then to obtain a permission slip from those users' parents to allow them to finish creating an account. It also forces us to change our moderation policies and stop anyone under 18 from accessing a wide variety of legal and beneficial speech because the state of Mississippi doesn't like it -- which, given the way Dreamwidth works, would mean blocking people from talking about those things at all. (And if you think you know exactly what kind of content the state of Mississippi doesn't like, you're absolutely right.)
Needless to say, we don't want to do that, either. Even if we wanted to, though, we can't: the resources it would take for us to build the systems that would let us do it are well beyond our capacity. You can read the sworn declaration I provided to the court for some examples of how unworkable these requirements are in practice. (That isn't even everything! The lawyers gave me a page limit!)
Unfortunately, the penalties for failing to comply with the Mississippi law are incredibly steep: fines of $10,000 per user from Mississippi who we don't have identity documents verifying age for, per incident -- which means every time someone from Mississippi loaded Dreamwidth, we'd potentially owe Mississippi $10,000. Even a single $10,000 fine would be rough for us, but the per-user, per-incident nature of the actual fine structure is an existential threat. And because we're part of the organization suing Mississippi over it, and were explicitly named in the now-overturned preliminary injunction, we think the risk of the state deciding to engage in retaliatory prosecution while the full legal challenge continues to work its way through the courts is a lot higher than we're comfortable with. Mississippi has been itching to issue those fines for a while, and while normally we wouldn't worry much because we're a small and obscure site, the fact that we've been yelling at them in court about the law being unconstitutional means the chance of them lumping us in with the big social media giants and trying to fine us is just too high for us to want to risk it. (The excellent lawyers we've been working with are Netchoice's lawyers, not ours!)
All of this means we've made the extremely painful decision that our only possible option for the time being is to block Mississippi IP addresses from accessing Dreamwidth, until we win the case. (And I repeat: I am absolutely incredibly confident we'll win the case. And apparently Justice Kavanaugh agrees!) I repeat: I am so, so sorry. This is the last thing we wanted to do, and I've been fighting my ass off for the last three years to prevent it. But, as everyone who follows the legal system knows, the Fifth Circuit is gonna do what it's gonna do, whether or not what they want to do has any relationship to the actual law.
We don't collect geolocation information ourselves, and we have no idea which of our users are residents of Mississippi. (We also don't want to know that, unless you choose to tell us.) Because of that, and because access to highly accurate geolocation databases is extremely expensive, our only option is to use our network provider's geolocation-based blocking to prevent connections from IP addresses they identify as being from Mississippi from even reaching Dreamwidth in the first place. I have no idea how accurate their geolocation is, and it's possible that some people not in Mississippi might also be affected by this block. (The inaccuracy of geolocation is only, like, the 27th most important reason on the list of "why this law is practically impossible for any site to comply with, much less a tiny site like us".)
If your IP address is identified as coming from Mississippi, beginning on September 1, you'll see a shorter, simpler version of this message and be unable to proceed to the site itself. If you would otherwise be affected, but you have a VPN or proxy service that masks your IP address and changes where your connection appears to come from, you won't get the block message, and you can keep using Dreamwidth the way you usually would.
On a completely unrelated note while I have you all here, have I mentioned lately that I really like ProtonVPN's service, privacy practices, and pricing? They also have a free tier available that, although limited to one device, has no ads or data caps and doesn't log your activity, unlike most of the free VPN services out there. VPNs are an excellent privacy and security tool that every user of the internet should be familiar with! We aren't affiliated with Proton and we don't get any kickbacks if you sign up with them, but I'm a satisfied customer and I wanted to take this chance to let you know that.
Again, we're so incredibly sorry to have to make this announcement, and I personally promise you that I will continue to fight this law, and all of the others like it that various states are passing, with every inch of the New Jersey-bred stubborn fightiness you've come to know and love over the last 16 years. The instant we think it's less legally risky for us to allow connections from Mississippi IP addresses, we'll undo the block and let you know.
dialecticdreamer - Feathering the Nest August 2025-- reportconuly - Wanton and dissipationysabetwordsmith - Today's Adventuresthewayne - A Kickstarter project that may be of interest for people who travel internationallyysabetwordsmith - Early Humanskellan_the_tabby - cats: objectively the best cat picture ever taken (& a couple of runnersup)wtfjht_feed - Day 1680: "So that'll be great."ysobel in agonyaunt - zero to nuclear?conuly in agonyaunt - (no subject)purplecat - Costume Bracket: Quarter Final, Post 1ysabetwordsmith - Birdfeedingysabetwordsmith - Let's Boycott Mississippidialecticdreamer - End of the Path (part 1 of 1, complete)cvirtue - Retail Mockingcvirtue - new garment from old sareecvirtue - DW (and BlueSky, and others) felled by MS lawconuly - I have so many dishes to washysabetwordsmith - Poetry Fishbowl on Tuesday, September 2conuly in agonyaunt - (no subject)denise in dw_news - Mississippi legal challenge: beginning 1 September, we will need to geoblock Mississippi IPsninetydegrees
