Poking around here for old times' sake, and realized I hadn't posted here since 2011!

Hello, LJ!  Hope you're all well out there.  

H/T to abluegirl for this one.  LJ now has some serious privacy issues.  Via an entry at journalfen: 

"New Livejournal release is the cause of massive user privacy breech

Are you a still a Livejournal user? Well, son, better hold onto your butt.

Yesterday morning, Livejournal announced that it had implemented release 86, which supposedly "fixed" and "improved" several features of the site. A little over 24 hours later, the complaints on the release post are still rolling in (around 800 comments worth at the time of this posting) concerning issues with the release. In fact, several users are encouraging others to contact the Better Business Bureau and find another journaling site to use. Now, this is the normal reaction to any given new Livejournal release, but this time, as Raylan Givens would say, it's justified.

So, what's all the hub-bub about? Well, as you may have noticed as a Livejournal user, the hover menu on a user's ID has changed significantly and certain browser add-ons like LJ Login no longer work. What you might not know is that there is now a random, but rampant privacy breech on the site. Several users are able to see the f-locked and the private entries of other users/communities even if they are not friended by or they are banned from that particular user/community. Not only that, but several users have been taken to another user's entries when they try edit their own. The same mix-up in redirects goes for the redirect to edit profiles, edit journal information/settings, managing userpics, and even checking your message inbox. To put it simply: certain users have complete access to another user's account.

Whether or not people will exploit this fact remains to be seen and the Livejournal staff has yet to comment on the issue."

Beep!

Question for you: what's the best thing you've read this year so far? And please take 'best' however you want - most enjoyable, most well-written, most intellectually stimulating, etc etc.

So far I'm really enjoying Smiley's People by John Le Carré, and possibly because of all the hype and the fun zombie-ness of it, I enjoyed Deadline by Mira Grant.

I have a lot of favorites, but here's a good one:

"The elevator continued its impossibly slow ascent."
-H. Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

"She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien’s theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can’t move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage."

-William Gibson (Pattern Recognition)

 ...and apologies if you've already seen it on other social media elsewhere, but it's too good not to share.  One does not simply Trololo out of Isengard.  


Via Topless Robot.

I don't seem to be using my LJ much anymore, although I'm still out and about on the internets.  If you're so inclined, you can find me here:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/mersipan

Tumblr: http://scifisweetheart.tumblr.com/

And if I know you in real life or we've been friends for quite a while, I'd be happy to add you on facebook as well - send me a message or leave a comment  :) 

 Whoa.  I like these.  They look a little bit like pop-out illustrations out of a a kid's book of MC Escher architecture...or like something has gone seriously amiss in SIMS-landia.  Whole collection here.    

 

Does anyone still read this thing?