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[staff profile] denise posting in [site community profile] dw_news

I'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.

Back from Worldcon

Aug. 21st, 2025 07:17 pm
catherineldf: (Default)
[personal profile] catherineldf
I took off a week ago Tuesday to fly to Seattle. The trip went well, apart from my flight being moved to 0 Dark Thirty, which was painful. I landed at our hotel, rendezvoused with the Merriams and we headed off to the Chihuly Museum and the Museum of Pop Culture.  For those playing along at home, that means that on 4 hours of sleep, I rode in a car, a plane, a monorail and a train in a day. But it was delightful! I hadn't been to the Chihuly Museum before - many of the exhibits were lovely. I had been to the Museum of Pop Culture before, back when my friend Brooks was the curator of the sf and f collection and enjoyed it. This time was fun as well, if a tad crowded.

After that, I picked up my reg stuff and met Nicole Kimberling of Blindeye Books for dinner at the ASEAN Food Hall. We had a long chat and got caught up; we last got to hang out pre-lockdown so it's been awhile. She puts out some excellent books - check them out! And when I got back, my friend and roomie for the weekend, Hugo Award Finalist Heather Rose Jones had arrived so we got caught up. Next day, I was on the queer-coded villains panel, which was fun. Then it was off to a delightful lunch with the glorious "steampunk personalities" (as we were all dubbed in The Steampunk Explorer), Madame Askew and the Grand Arbiter and one of their friends. I puttered around the con running into people, including hanging out with with my pals Rob and Peter from D.C, and dropping books off at the Liminal Fiction table in the Dealer's Room before heading out to meet my friend Brooks and his sweetie Lisa for dinner. Then Brooks and I were off to the Clarion West party at Hugo House. Got to chat with a bunch of folks there, including Casey Blair, who I hadn't seen for a few years, including Charlie Jane Anders and more, as well as hanging out with Jennie Goloboy and meeting Astrid Bear.

Thursday was my "light" day so I went to Concurrent at the Union Theater for an interesting panel on publishing short fiction. A friend who was on the panel became ill so I sat with her for awhile after the panel. Multiple people checked in and fortunately, she was doing better after some rest so after checking a couple of times, I got her a Lyft and sent her back to her hotel. She was doing much better all weekend so I was very glad that things turned around!
  I think I went to a good panel on Medieval Women Writers after that and the art show and such. I had lunch with my former editor and friend, Evan J. Peterson, an hour or so before he found out that he was a finalist for the Endeavor Award. I did some more puttering about and spent some time with delightful pals Monica Valentinelli, Matt McElroy and LaShawn Wanak. After that, it was off to dinner with Heather, the Merriams, Jody Wurl and her friend Cynthia. Friday was my Table Talk, which was fun! Someone showed up to talk about my gaming, someone else stopped by to ask about the werewolf books and another person wanted to talk publishing. Then I grabbed lunch with LaShawn and worked a shift at the Liminal Fiction table, where I finally met J. Scott Coatsworth in person. Then I got to hang out with Martha Wells and her husband for a nice chat. After that, I went off to a fun-filled Seattle Underground tour with the Merriams. 

Saturday was my reading, which could have gone better (I had a coughing fit), but was well attended. I chatted with folks and sold some books, which was nice. I met up with various folks (apologies for things blurring a bit by then), worked another table shift, did some other things, then went and did the Joanna Russ panel. It went well - lot of good discussion and some anecdotes. 

I then grabbed dinner and went back to our room to watch the Hugo Awards. A brief pause from general goodwill: I watched the first 45 minutes of the ceremony with the sound on, got tired of the song repetition and the mispronunciations of finalist names and switched to captions. So I missed the part where the editorial staff of Khoreo got skipped over and the Lodestar finalist was skipped completely and a bunch of things covered elsewhere. I will just say that when GRRM mangled multiple finalist names at the 2020 Hugo Awards in New Zealand, there was an understandable hue and cry about it and it was deemed highly disrespectful (which it was). This is no different and the impacted finalists are due an apology. Also: for the love of whatever you hold sacred, Hugo Admins, address the damn issue. Hire transcriptionists, compel the hosts to practice names, record the names ahead of time, but DO SOMETHING so we stop experiencing this frankly xenophobic nonsense every year. EDITED: turns out the Hugo Awards Committee may have done things to address this and the issues lie more squarely at the door of the presenters and possibly the on the ground folks administering the awards.


Sunday, I went to a panel on romantasy, then had lunch with Heather (who did not win, but enjoyed herself anyway). Then we toddled off to the Amtrak station where Jody, the Merriams and I ran into local author powerhouse Pat Wrede. We all hung out until we boarded the bus to Spokane (there were train issues) for a four hour trip across the state of Washington. They did let us board the train and get into the sleepers around 10 even though the train wasn't leaving until 1AM. I got a couple of hours of broken napping, then roused Jody from the upper bunk so we could grab breakfast before watching morning over Glacier National Park. It was glorious!

The rest of the trip was lively. The dining car ran out of most food because they were supposed to stock up in Seattle, but couldn't. Staff was very stiff upper lip about it and did the best they could and we were sympathetic (and tipped). I didn't get much sleep what with the train rattling and all, but Monday night was better than Saturday. All in all, though, it was a fun expedition and I'm glad I did it! Big shoutout to Tony for picking up Jody and Kevin for picking up the rest of us to go home.

I'm currently in the midst of a two day women in publishing virtual conference and scrambling to get caught up on sundries. Still job hunting, but unemployment came through so that helps a bunch. Tomorrow, more conference and other things, before going to the State Fair with my friend Matt. More updates on the conference as soon as it wraps!


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