The Aerie

Ownership and Censorship

Well, here's one reason why I insist on running my own server. Actually there are a lot of reasons, and it's not as if I don't participate in discussion on other blogs around the Internet, but I've always been painfully aware that the stuff I post to other sites is stuff I hand away. So when Livejournal decides to trash the posts of thousands of their customers, I feel a smug satisfaction. Now, the fact that I don't HAVE thousands of readers, well...

I benefit from the perspective of decades of participating in these online forums. I've been on these things so long that referring to them as "fora" strikes me as pretentious as the phrase "the Noösphere," a name some early wags tried to afflict upon the Internet. I probably posted to my first forum sometime around 1977, so I've seen a lot of my contributed information vanish into the ether, usually as systems were shut down.

While the LiveJournal decision is unusually arbitrary and abrupt - would it have killed them to notify the groups so people could archive content or arrange to move elsewhere? - it hardly surprises me. It's all been done before.

What does surprise me is the number of organizations that offhandedly use these public services for mission-critical communications. Most astonishing for me was discovering, back in 2001, that ISC2, the security-certification organization, uses Yahoo Groups for its members-only communications. Data Security is divided into Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability components, and using a third party's conferencing system for your communications compromises all of these to some degree or other. Yet here's a premiere security organization doing so, as they have been for years.

My church uses a Yahoo Group for its community discussion, and while these are not mission-critical information, it would be a pity and a shame if they were lost. Of course my church doesn't have the fiscal or technical wherewithal to run its own servers, but as with ISC2 these are the discussions of the community. They are an archive of what the organization was thinking and saying at various points in time: they have value as historic archives if nothing else. But if Yahoo shut down tomorrow, where would these communications go? As with my 1977 forum posts, they would evaporate, gone forever.

And of course with LiveJournal you have the issue of censorship. Presumably LiveJournal had some criteria they used to decide which topics to delete, but I'm sure this wasn't an open process. As with those content-blockers that strive to restrict sex and end up blocking information on treating breast cancer, the application of arbitrary criteria in a ham-handed manner is bound to be a disaster. And for what? To trade the slim possibility of future legal injunction for the near-certainty of a reduction in clientèle.

And while they're taking big clumsy steps to avoid some arbitrary future regulation, is LiveJournal fully compliant with existing regulations regarding data management? Do they have a robust disaster-recovery plan? Are they capable of continuing operations if servers were to be seized as evidence by law enforcement? While I'm sure someone at LiveJournal has explored these topics, my professional experience suggests to me that they have probably not set their entire house in order before embarking upon this recent escapade.

So while I don't have vibrant discussions of Klingon-style knitting or nude cross-country skiing taking place on my server, at least I know what my data is, and where it's backed up. And it's in my hands if I care to preserve it for the amusement of my grandchildren or the analysis of future historians.

All the stuff I've posted to the Star Tribune website or even to LiveJournal could be deleted at a moment's notice.

Posted by Albatross at May 31, 2007 1:20 PM | TrackBack