Ian Macdonald @ianmacd@qoto.org

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?

#TwitterTakeover

Wouldn't it be funny if the intolerant woke mob moved to #Mastodon to escape the arrival of free speech on #Twitter, and all the people on Mastodon started posting to Twitter again?

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?

#FvD

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

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

"Donderdagnacht verspeelden #Kaag, #Hoekstra en #Segers de kans om met één donderende klap een einde te maken aan tien jaar achterkamertjespolitiek van Mark #Rutte. De komende weken zal blijken hoe recht de rug van Kaag met haar ‘nieuwe leiderschap’ is."

https://www.vn.nl/rutte-kaag-geitenpaadje/

De coalitiepartijen houden #Rutte voor de zoveelste keer weer overeind. Hoe zal de nieuwe coalitie eruit gaan zien? vraagt zich inmiddels niemand in Nederland meer af.

Het 'nieuwe leiderschap' waar u in campagnetijd de mond zo vol van had, #Kaag?

Miljoenen #D66 kiezers belazerd

#Kaag van #D66 voerde campagne op 'nieuw leiderschap', maar schaarde zich, toen het erop aankwam, gewoon weer achter #Rutte. Met dit akelige lafhartige staaltje van oud leiderschap verraadt zij hoe de vork echt in de steel zit, en holt de Nederlandse democratie nog verder uit.

In veel gevallen wel, ja. #vrijheid #ikbeneenwappie
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RT @MikeinNederland
Precies. #Vrijheid #ikbeneenwappie
https://twitter.com/MikeinNederland/status/1375809106930499590

xkcd 1357 presents a cogent, yet naively simplistic and ultimately one-sided view of free speech. Indeed, things go awry in the very first frame, in which it is claimed that free speech amounts to no more than one's ability to speak without fear of arrest by the government. However, many people, myself included, would contend that the right to free speech is a philosophical concept that far transcends this narrow American legal definition.

The waters suddenly become much murkier when one examines the fact that large corporations with (socio-)political agendas have, in recent years, become more powerful and influential than even national governments and heads of state. This is an alarming and undesirable development, since said corporations are not subject to any third-party oversight or regulation, and there is no independent process of appeal against their summary judgements or the imposition of punitive measures.

This grave situation has steadily worsened over the last decade as the reach of these companies has expanded and gone largely unchecked by governments who either cannot see the danger rising before them, or find themselves without any existing legal recourse to combat it. The unfettered growth of this influence has emboldened these corporations to reach increasingly harsh and arbitrary judgements against selected users, whilst making proportionately diminishing efforts to justify their actions.

In many cases, governments have been not merely ineffective at curtailing this rise in influence, but instrumental in it, by misguidedly conferring on these corporations an editorial responsibility for the utterings of their users that no mere carrier or publisher should either want or be forced to bear. Historically, we have not demanded of the postal service that it take responsibility for the missives it conveys, nor of telecommunications carriers that they intervene if controversial and challenging ideas are sent over their cables and airwaves. Corporations like #Facebook and #Twitter are essentially no different, and should enjoy and be bounded by the same status, because to confer more is to endow them with a power that they can abuse, have abused, and will continue to abuse.

The rise of these corporations' influence has seen the town square, where we are free to gather and engage in public debate, controversial or otherwise, slowly undergo a paradigm shift from the physical world to the virtual realm; the crucial and essential difference being that access to the virtual town square is not without encumberment. It is not a public forum, and access to it is granted, tolerated and revoked at the pleasure of said corporations.

This grim development has been further catalysed by the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic, which, in many parts of the world, has resulted in the actual revocation of the right to public assembly in a physical space. In much of the world, including the so-called free world, the actual town square no longer exists as a hub for the free and unhampered exchange of ideas. The ability to express one's thoughts is now largely confined to the virtual realm, and the freedom to wield one's voice in that expression is now, in no small part, at the whim of corporations run by megalomaniacal billionaire ideologues.

When the arena in which public debate takes place shifts to new ground, discourse in that new territory needs to be afforded the same privileges and protections it enjoys elsewhere. This is not currently the case, and our right to free speech is under extreme duress as a result.

Never a day passes now without new cases documented of "hateful" people having the right to voice their "problematic" thoughts and opinions suppressed. And with "hateful" and "problematic" being such subjective concepts, this is an extremely slippery slope on which society now finds itself.

You may have cause to celebrate the downfall of your particular chosen foe today, but when the tables turn tomorrow and it is now you or those you advocate in the sights of these corporations' guns, who will you turn to then?

To those who write about #Stallman's alleged transphobia, I offer this response.

Stallman is demonstrably not transphobic. If you believe otherwise, I wonder whether you have actually read Stallman's own writings on his use of pronouns, or merely formed an opinion from what secondary sources have reported. Stallman's stance on the subject can be found at https://stallman.org/articles/genderless-pronouns.html

Regardless of Stallman's position on this issue, a transgender person's perceived right to be addressed using the pronouns of his or her choice does not compel another person to act in accordance with that perception. In most Western liberal democracies, most people enjoy a very real, i.e. legally protected, right to free speech; certainly to the extent that the speaker's choice of pronouns is concerned.

As such, rigid adherence to certain constructs of language can, at worst, be ascribed to self-interest, namely the assertion that the existent right to free speech trumps another's perceived right to be addressed in a particular way. That's a wholly reasonable attitude to take on principle alone, and garners more weight as one examines the pressure currently being placed on this central tenet of liberal society by regressive elements and their proclivity for cancel culture.

The suppression of free speech has far-reaching consequences for the whole of humanity; the inflexible use of pronouns affects a much smaller subset.

Richard #Stallman a.k.a. #RMS is the founder of the Free Software Foundation (#FSF), author of the original versions of **gcc** and **Emacs**, and perhaps best known for his creation of the GNU Public Licence a.k.a. #GPL.

Thanks to the pioneering work of Richard Stallman, Android has a freely available kernel that can boot it, and companies like Samsung are forced to release their augmented kernel source code to us every month, so that we can build — using Stallman's compiler — a working custom recovery like TWRP.

Richard Stallman is currently under coordinated attack by the cancel culture mob. They have him firmly in their sights and have set their hearts on trying to get him removed from the board of the organisation he founded in 1985, and which has been his life's work.

The reason for the attack is that Stallman is alleged to hold views that are "problematic" in the eyes of his detractors.

My own stance is that to even engage in debate of Stallman's views would be to lend credence to the notion that they are somehow germane to the work that Stallman does in support of free software. I contend that they are not, which is not to imply that the accusations leveled at Stallman would otherwise require intellectual or moral contortion to refute. They would not. Stallman's views, even if they were relevant, have been grossly misrepresented.

The attempted silencing of free speech is always painful to behold, but this ill-conceived attack on Stallman is particularly stomach-turning, given how much of his life he has devoted to the freedom of others, including those who accuse him now.

His contributions to free software and his consistent, uncompromising commitment to his beliefs regarding software freedom have made millionaires of others, including many among his accusers now, while Stallman himself continues to lead a life of subsistence.

#Android would not exist if it hadn't been for Stallman.

Without Stallman, we would not have the assurance that important software like #Magisk will continue to exist long after the project's creator has moved on.

Without Stallman, #TWRP would not now exist.

Were it not for Richard Stallman, most of the cheap electronic appliances and gadgets in your home would simply not exist.

Without Richard Stallman's groundbreaking work, the world would be a different and much worse place.

Now you can do something in return. Richard Stallman needs your support.

Please consider signing the petition below:

https://github.com/rms-support-letter/rms-support-letter.github.io

If you need more background before signing, please take the time to do your own research and reach your own conclusions.

The quest to rid my life of #bigtech and reduce my reliance on centralised services continues.

So let's see if this is properly crossposed from #Mastodon to #Twitter.