Ian Macdonald @ianmacd@qoto.org
Sceptic; atheist; secularist; autodidact; cunning linguist; polemicist; nationalist; conspiracy realist; programmer; globetrotter; Silicon Valley survivor.
Joined Mar 2021
Session instant messenger is fraught with serious problems.
24 hours ago, I permanently shut down the Session open group server sog.caliban.org.
A dump was made of the server’s PostgreSQL database to be preserved for posterity and even potential future resurrection. The dump contains the full history of every group carried by the server at the time of its closure. This includes a considerable quantity of detailed domain knowledge unavailable elsewhere, particularly as it relates to the use of the SOGS ecosystem itself.
I can’t quite remember when I launched sog.caliban.org, but it was one of the first third-party SOGS on the platform, back when the server was still written in Rust.
With the PySOGS rewrite, the future of SOGS had never looked brighter. PySOGS sported a myriad of powerful new features, functionality that for the most part to this day still hasn’t been implemented in the Session client.
Alas, over the last few years, we have seen the open group ecosystem slowly reclaimed by the virtual jungle. For several years now, it has been all but disavowed by its creators and custodians, whose silent abandonment of the software has allowed the associated ecosystem to languish, fester and decay to its current state, whereby it is now little more than a sordid haven for the very worst elements of society (to wit, paedophiles), policed by a few dedicated souls determined to save humanity from itself.
The creators of Session are now consumed by a desperate, last-ditch attempt to save their own skins and keep the lights on in the Melbourne office. To this end, an unwieldy full 180° U-turn is being executed to abandon Session’s underlying private cryptocurrency, OXEN, and rejigger the project atop a new ERC-20 token with a public ledger, SENT.
Apart from the obvious privacy implications suggested by such a move, the focus of all OPTF resources on this one task has brought the already imperceptibly slow development of their user-facing software to a standstill. As a simple example of this, just consider how many years the Session community been waiting for the critically necessary reimplementation of closed groups.
That’s not the worst of it, however.
In the process of the switchover to SENT (which can be viewed as analogous to a stock split in the traditional equities market), the creators of Session have made the brazenly unethical and heavily lambasted decision to treat themselves much more favourably than the loyal community that has supported them and kept their operations afloat all these years.
OXEN holders will receive an allocation of SENT from a finite pool after the transition. The finite nature of the SENT pool is only the first catch, however. One must actively stake OXEN on the service node network during the transitional phase in order to qualify for the automatic conversion of that OXEN to SENT afterwards.
Those who elect for whichever reason not to participate in keeping the network afloat, perhaps because (like me) they have already incurred heavy financial losses that they wish to limit, will receive nothing at all. In the brave new world of SENT, they must find their own way to rid themselves of their now defunct OXEN, which itself has already become quite the challenge, as OXEN has been delisted from just about every cryptocurrency exchange over the last couple of years, due to the lack of interest in the currency. This lack of interest can again be attributed to the OPTF’s failure to properly develop and promote the OXEN currency.
Session’s creators have engineered this pivotal moment in an attempt to erase their chequered financial past and print a vault full of brand new currency for themselves. If they are successful, the subsequent market capitalisation of SENT will be much larger than that of OXEN, the chief effect of which will be that OXEN holders will see significant dilution in the value of their positions in the transition to SENT.
What we are witnessing here is the misappropriation and redirection of value from the community to the coffers of the OPTF. In simple language, we are being robbed.
The OPTF is marketing the transition to a public token as essential for the project’s survival, but even if that were true, nothing is forcing them to allocate a vastly disproportionate share of the newly minted currency to themselves. That is an entirely voluntary decision made for purely selfish reasons. It is theft, pure and simple. They know it and we know it.
With no revenue streams to speak of, but a payroll of handsome salaries to maintain, the well of money generated by OXEN’s initial coin offering (cf. IPO) in 2018 is now running out.
With bankruptcy looming ever larger on the horizon and still no monetised product in sight, a new way of replenishing the depleted runway had to be devised. Well, why not just mint a new coin and do it all over again. After all, it worked once, so why not twice?
Hopefully the wisdom of the old adage ‘once bitten, twice shy’ will prevail amongst the user base here, but the cryptocurrency universe is a fragmented and capricious one. Even cryptocurrency aficionados by and large still haven’t heard of OXEN, so there is ample scope for the OPTF to attempt to jettison the past and simply start anew with a fresh wide-eyed community of exploitable investor fodder.
It is perhaps no coincidence that the OPTF has launched its SENT discussion and support forums not on Session or Telegram, but on Discord, a platform that is anathema to most privacy advocates.
With their negligent treatment of SOGS, the glacial pace of Session’s development, the consistent lack of pre-release QA, the apathy shown to critical bugs and service interruptions, the failure to capitalise on real-world events to promote and grow Session, and now the unethical treatment of their investors, the management behind Session have shown themselves to be a self-serving band of crooks and incompetents.
This is the chief reason why I want nothing more to do with this project. Incompetence is, to a large extent, forgivable. After all, we are not born with knowledge, and intelligent people can learn from their mistakes. What I can’t forgive, however, is dishonesty. Without trust, we have no foundation on which to build.
The annals of tech history are adorned with great ideas that received terrible execution, and Session seems destined to join them before long. Under the current management, this project is doomed. The current custodians of the project simply do not possess the intellectual or moral wherewithal to see it through to success.
Even if they are successful in executing this coup against their own community, no good will come of it. It will merely postpone the inevitable. It doesn’t matter how much of a runaway you allocate yourself, if you possess neither the will nor the ability to reach take-off velocity. Failure is inevitable. It will just take longer, cost more, and raise the victim count this way.
After many years of broken promises, missed deadlines and excuses, this project’s team has still not managed to launch even a basic monetised product. Session incurs only losses for its creators, hence the management’s concentration now of all resources on the switchover to SENT.
It’s no exaggeration to state that Session continues to exist by the grace of its battle-scarred service node operators, many of whom (like myself) would like nothing more than to sell off our positions in the now practically worthless OXEN currency.
As an incentive to stay aboard the sinking ship, however, service node operators who continue to operate their nodes during the transitional period have been promised an extra allocation of post-launch SENT to mildly offset their OXEN losses.
This bonus is but a drop in the ocean; a tiny, withering carrot dangled in front of starving operators to goad them into continuing to keep the ailing network afloat at their own expense and against their better judgement.
And the ruse is working, because so many operators are so far into the red at this point that they have little left to lose. Every inveterate gambler wants to believe that a miraculous turnaround is still possible, even as his clammy hand lays his last few chips on the green baize of the roulette table.
Never underestimate the power of denial.
With this incentive from the OPTF, we’re effectively being told that they will steal less from us than from others if we agree to be complicit in their robbery. My response to this has been to shut down 39 of the 40 service nodes I used to run. My final node will be decommissioned when its current VPS contract expires.
The whole network is hanging by a volatile thread of delusional FOMO, coercion and resignation; and as we have seen in recent weeks, it takes only a single attacker to put the entire network under heavy strain. The Session network remains highly vulnerable to attack, and I caution users not to put more faith in it than it deserves.
Despite my misgivings, I have continued to offer sog.caliban.org over the last year as a continuing service to the community, a community I enjoyed being a daily part of until my decision to abandon the platform in December 2023.
Because sog.caliban.org was one of the first open group servers, it was disproportionately popular, probably second only to the official SOGS server. As such, I didn’t want to flip the switch overnight and leave the server’s many users high and dry. The SOGS ecosystem offers no redundancy whatsoever, so there would have been no easy way for orphaned users from my server to organise themselves and find alternative servers for their discussions.
Since the announcement on 24th June of the shutdown of sog.caliban.org, no-one came forward to take over the administrative and financial burden of running the server, although one or two people created replacement groups on other servers for a couple of the topics hosted by my server. These replacements unfortunately lack their predecessors’ message history.
All good things must come to an end, and so it was with a still somewhat heavy heart that I finally shut down and archived sog.caliban.org yesterday.
I wish Session’s users well in the future, and in particular in the continuing struggle to protect your digital rights against a determined foe that is gaining ground and encroaching on our privacy more and more with each passing day.
Verifying that I control the following Nostr public key: "npub10g6t6tww9mf0xjzvlsy6647e8s74lvcfvdwj2kwl9x7tarvrd7pqy7ajnl"
@elonmusk should change the #Twitter logo to a phoenix, since the bird is miraculously rising from the ashes today.
Why aren't all the liberals celebrating? After all, the USA's richest African American just struck a major blow for freedom.
No?
I'll be the judge of what's disinformation, thank you very much. I don't need the world's information curated for me by a condescending busybody with a moral superiority complex.
Goodbye, #DuckDuckGo. It was fun while it lasted.
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RT @yegg
Like so many others I am sickened by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the gigantic humanitarian crisis it continues to create. #StandWithUkraine️
At DuckDuckGo, we've been rolling out search updates tha…
https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1501716484761997318
Kan iemand mij uitleggen waaruit blijkt dat Thierry Baudet #Baudetlandverrader is? Dat moet ik gemist hebben vandaag.
Of gaat het hier alleen maar om de zoveelste afgezaagde hashtag waarmee de roeptoetsers elkaar weer geil maken?
Ik ben al een tijdje bezig, Thierry. Dit land heeft de ijsberg geraakt. Het komt niet meer goed.
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RT @thierrybaudet
Het wordt ook tijd om na te denken over een vluchtplan. Zijn er nog geen landen die ons, ongevaccineerden - dwz: kritische, onafhankelijke geesten, zelfstandige figuren, prima burgers kortom - asiel hebben aangeboden? Landen die NIET meedoen aan de totalitaire machtsgreep? https://twitter.com/rblommestijn/status/1466…
https://twitter.com/thierrybaudet/status/1466031229124460546
WIE verwondt #Baudet nou eigenlijk? Ik hoor alleen derden met een politieke agenda klagen, nooit bv. een jood.
En #Rutte? Brengt hij de waardigheid van de Kamer geen schade toe wanneer hij deze steeds belazert? Maar met hem kun je meeregeren, dus dan kijk je natuurlijk wel weg.
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RT @SigridKaag
Op Baudet reageren of niet? Dat is steeds het dilemma. Voor de nare oogst van dit weekend wil ik niet wegkijken.
Hij verwondt mensen met zij…
https://twitter.com/SigridKaag/status/1459952691820572682
@trinsec
De grond ligt vol met mensen die hun toestand pas serieus namen toen het al te laat was. Dus loop maar lekker in de pas, brave. Op hoop van zegen maar.
@trinsec
"Tweedeling is wat je ervan maakt", zeg je. Nou, maak er dan maar het beste van, zou ik maar zeggen.
Mensen die aan de bevoordeelde kant van een tweedeling zitten geloven dikwijls dat ze onverstoord verder kunnen leven, dat ze niet onderhevig zijn aan de onrust in de samenleving. Maar vroeg of laat komt Boontje meestal wel om zijn loontje. Dat wijst de geschiedenis telkens weer uit.
Zet dus je elektronische enkelband maar lekker om en geniet van je avondje uit. Je betaalt er tenslotte een hoge prijs voor.
@trinsec
Natuurlijk. Het zal vast wel allemaal meevallen, deze tweedeling in de samenleving.
Want wat is er nou zo erg aan drang? Gewoon aan toegeven, het is veel makkelijker zo.
En wat is er mis met bespioneerd worden door de overheid als je toch niets te verbergen hebt? Gewoon in meegaan, hoor.
Blijf maar lekker wegkijken.
China's social credit system is coming to the Netherlands, introduced by a government that has resigned in disgrace once already, but remains in office regardless.
I am proud to belong to the new Dutch underclass that rejects coercion and surveillance. #coronapas #NewNormal
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RT @thierrybaudet
I am Thierry, I live in the Netherlands. From the 25th of September, my family and I will be banned from restaurants, ceremonies, cultural …
https://twitter.com/thierrybaudet/status/1437305540368113667
@matthewbischoff Let's try to remember that no-one is forced to purchase the products of companies they wholeheartedly disapprove of.
Vote with your wallet and your feet.
@miamiautumn Historically, respecting gender identity has been straightforward and easy. People's given names reveal in most cultures the gender of their bearer. I won't go into the exceptions in Anglo-Saxon culture, as we all know what they are.
The advent and rise of anonymous or pseudonymous on-line discussion have muddied the waters a lot, as one can no longer reliably infer a person's gender from a nickname or the absense of any monicker.
This already troublesome situation has been exacerbated by the rise in recent years of gender dysphoria and the notion that there are, in fact, an infinite number of plausible genders.
The idea that one should have to resort to looking up a stranger's preferred pronouns in some authoritative global directory before referring to them in the third person, seems woefully impractical to the point of being doomed, and certainly not something I would be prepared to do.
It perhaps deserves reiteration here that any direct conversation between two people doesn't involve either referring to the other in the third person, so the issue of alleged pronoun dispect doesn't occur nearly as much in practice as the present attention to the subject in the media would suggest.
Regarding the use of 'they', 'their' and 'them' in the singular, perhaps the degree to which this seems unnatural depends on where one is from.
I grew up in the south-west of England, and whilst these words were sometimes used to refer to indefinite singular subjects whose name and gender were not known (e.g. "a person and their belongings"), they were *never* used to refer to an individual whose name at least was known.
That's why the use of American social media that peddle contrived abominations such as 'William has updated their status' is anathema to me. I used to read such text and literally wonder 'What? Whose status has William updated and why?' before the penny dropped.
I am now accustomed to seeing such verbal contortion, but I find it no less jarring than I ever did.
To me, language is central to my sense of self. It's at the very core of my existence and feels more closely woven with my identity than even my body or how I appear to others.
It's for this reason that the current sociopolitical trend towards compelling members of society to engage in increasingly outlandish excesses of so-called inclusive speech meet with so much resistance. It is experienced by many as a personal attack, and for every inch one concedes, a further mile is taken.
That said, I obviously can't disagree with the entirely reasonable stance that individuals enaged in any kind of discussion should show each other courtesy and respect. And as obvious as that sentiment might seem, the practice has gone into dramatic decline in recent years, ironically due in no small part to the outbursts of many who demand that the rest of us be more tolerant.
Ian Macdonald
boosted
🇳🇱
A chart showing the signature count as a graph comparing the #rms open support letter vs the anti-stallman letter... yay the letter in support of stallman is not just winning, but it seems to be growing in support where the other letter has lost steam and stopped growing.
The link below includes the script used to generate the chart
RMS
ML2, I pretty much agree word for word with your comments about #RMS. That will come as no surprise, given what I have already written here and elsewhere.
I do, however, want to address one thing you said, namely the phrase "as out-of-touch and inappropriate as his Epstein comments were, they do not rise to that level for me".
What's inappropriate to one person is acceptable to another, of course, but both in the tumult that rose over #Stallman two years ago and in the afterbirth pains of that discussion experienced over the last week, I can't help but suspect that many who claim to find Stallman's comments inappropriate actually find the summarised misrepresentations of those comments by others inappropriate. Those summaries are almost invariably caricatures of what Stallman actually said.
In other words, reports of Stallman's support for Epstein have been grossly exaggerated, and perhaps to even call them an exaggeration is hyperbolic in itself, because the term implies that some small kernel of truth was magnified out of all proportion. In reality, what Stallman said and how his words have been reported bear almost no resemblance to each other.
In the case of Stallman's comments on Epstein, the mainstream tech media reporting — both two years ago and over the last week — has been nothing short of sloppy and ignorant at best (using only secondary sources with no research into their accuracy), or wilfully misrepresentative at worst (people with a personal axe to grind against Stallman, and those seeking to further whichever agenda they deem worthy of slaughtering the truth for).
On 25th April 2019, Stallman wrote:
"Labor Secretary Acosta's plea deal for Jeffrey Epstein was not only extremely lenient, it was so lenient that it was illegal.
I wonder whether this makes it possible to resentence him to a longer prison term.
I disagree with some of what the article says about Epstein. Epstein is not, apparently, a pedophile, since the people he raped seem to have all been postpuberal.
By contrast, calling him a "sex offender" tends to minimize his crimes, since it groups him with people who committed a spectrum of acts of varying levels of gravity. Some of them were not crimes. Some of these people didn't actually do anything to anyone.
I think the right term for a person such as Epstein is "serial rapist"."
It's pretty clear from the above remarks that Stallman is not in support of any of the acts for which Epstein was prosecuted. Stallman argues only the specific legal applicability of the term "paedophile".
--
Note that the above remarks from Stallman were made 5 months before his comments to the MIT CSAIL mailing-list which led to the massive storm of protest against him.
In the wake of that storm, Stallman wrote again on 14th September 2019:
"I want to respond to the misleading media coverage of messages I posted about Marvin Minsky's association with Jeffrey Epstein. The coverage totally mischaracterised my statements.
Headlines say that I defended Epstein. Nothing could be further from the truth. I've called him a "serial rapist", and said he deserved to be imprisoned. But many people now believe I defended him — and other inaccurate claims — and feel a real hurt because of what they believe I said.
I'm sorry for that hurt. I wish I could have prevented the misunderstanding."
--
If there were any lingering doubts about where Stallman stood on Epstein after his earlier writings, the above clarification seems impossible for anyone acting in good faith to misinterpret. And perhaps that's precisely the reason that all of the melodramatic coverage of this affair over the last week has steadfastly chosen to ignore it.
Call me cynical, but I find it hard to give reporters the benefit of the doubt and chalk this up to a mere failure to conduct proper research. We live in such politically charged times that I much more strongly suspect malice and the furthering of a specific sociopolitical agenda to be at the heart of the media's widespread misreporting of this story.
Ultimately, it's hard for me to understand how anyone could find Stallman's actual stance on Epstein to be inappropriate, much less worthy of the tsunami of condemnation he once again now faces; which, I hasten to reiterate, is a response that I could never find appropriate anyway, since I maintain that Stallman's views on anything unrelated to free software, palatable or not, are utterly irrelevant to his professional work.
In veel gevallen wel, ja. #vrijheid #ikbeneenwappie
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RT @MikeinNederland
Precies. #Vrijheid #ikbeneenwappie
https://twitter.com/MikeinNederland/status/1375809106930499590
Sceptic; atheist; secularist; autodidact; cunning linguist; polemicist; nationalist; conspiracy realist; programmer; globetrotter; Silicon Valley survivor.
Joined Mar 2021
