Hi, I am Alexander, I live in Russia and I am huge cryptocurrency opponent. I hate just about everything about crypto: waste of resources, technical imperfections, five billion kinds of competing coins some of which are clearly fraudulent, great involvement of crypto in scams, speculative investments and all kinds malicious usage some of which were made possible by crypto (e.g. mainstream ransomware). Also little reliability of agents dealing crypto who at the same time have zero responsibility yet require trust.

Who needs "money" like that, right? People invented banking, payment systems and other financial institutions for a reason. I swore I would never touch it.

Year 2022 came and brought War like one Horseman¹ of Apocalypse already hanging around wasn't enough.

• Most popular global payment systems blocked Russia which was bad enough itself but what was even worse it became almost impossible to pay for services which remained operational but had no other forms of payment.
• SWIFT bank transfers mostly stopped working and what remained became very expensive.
• Some foreign investment accounts were frozen. So much for investing in US shares. Poof.
• EU now forbids exporting euros to Russia and some countries (like Finland) can actually confiscate² cash on border.
• Local accounts in foreign currency are restricted by the government which means you can't withdraw cash from them in substantial amount.
• At the same time now they have negative interest rates so if you just leave them they will get depleted anyway. The only way is to convert them to rubles at shamelessly low rates.
• Ruble, local currency, has about four very different rates towards other currencies (depends where, how and in which direction you convert) and suffers from high inflation (which again is very different depending how you calculate but significant no matter what).
• Local government as well as just about everyone else tightened all kinds of financial regulations, restrictions and tracking.
• Looks like everyone declared cold war on cash. I have some money in 500 and 200 euro notes which apparently are next to impossible to use in EU now because are you drug dealer, gun runner or child trafficker as no one else has use for these notes? Locally it is a bit better but clearly not for long.

...

So here I am standing before you admitting I broke my oath. I still think crypto is crap. So is the current state of the world and I hate to say it but the future doesn't look much brighter. I thought these cryptoanarchists had distorted perspective - apparently not. It is not that their vision is dystopian - it is our world that becomes ugly mess fitting their expectations.

#BraveNewWorld #crypto #cryptocurrency #Russia #nowar

¹ - Pestilence of course. Although if you like the other interpretation where it is Conquest - it fits even better.

² - As I hear they don't formally confiscate euro cash on Finnish border but "take it to be returned later on the next visit" and don't really search for it but it happens.

Open Letter to the international IT and telecom companies
You can read it sign it with the link above. However I never liked canned news so here is what it is all about and why it matters in my own words.

As sanctions keep piling up on Russia some of things here become increasingly restricted and this affects freedom of communication. Ironically this is the effect Putin wants - the government is busy building up their Internet censorship and control. Now as the result of some sanctions people trying to maintain independent services and censorship circumvention tools are under attack from both sides. Myself included.

Some examples:
Thawte certification authority suddenly revoked certificates of some services (banks mostly) which gave the government the reason to double down on imposing national certificate system. If successful it opens unprecedented opportunities for censorship and surveillance.

NameCheap domain registrar suddenly refused supporting customers from Russia forcing them to either move their domains immediately or lose them. This together with rumors of the government imposing isolation measures on Russian part of network made many people move their websites and services into Russian-controlled zone.

Some backbone ISPs like Cogent disconnected Russia impacting network connectivity and making it easier to shutdown, control and censor.

Visa and Mastercard payment systems withdrawing is probably the hardest blow for everyone who hosted something outside of Russia as there is no easy way to pay for services or receive donations for them. This also forces many people to migrate their projects back to homeland where they risk to be seized and their owners prosecuted.

While I understand the reasons for diplomatic pressure and public reaction to the events in Ukraine I can't believe this is the effect we want. This hurts the opposition, freedom of speech and access to information. I can't access some of the links above without VPN. Soon I likely won't be able to get on the global network without VPN - and not public one, these get blocked every day.

And the last thing - free social networks like this one are one of few remaining bridges between Russian and Ukrainian people. Mainstream networks are getting ugly, media sources get banned and blocked by the opposing sites. Here we still can talk. Hopefully it will last.

#NoWar #Russia #Ukraine

Diaspora spam

Oh hi there again, #podmin's and common folks!
You may remember my recent question about #Disapora #spam, right? Oh you don't? Well it was only in 2019. And there was no response, obviosuly. Nor in community. Nor anywhere really.

The problem is that it's no fun to operate a public server with no antispam measurement and admin features, obviosuly. The world is full of wankers playing with scripts creating infinite accounts and it's not fun when they "just" create accounts, it's not fun when they create dubious contents, and possibly doing comment or follow spam.

To be honest I don't quite understand these Russians. I mean, I almost exclusively have them from #Russia, be that serverhub.ru or the general Voronezh area. A few Ukrainians from Kiev, but overshadowed by the Kremlin guys. They create a lot of accounts but I see no visible activity on them, neither posts nor follows. They log in once, register, leave.

But I do not want to have them anyway.

Diaspora devs - however nice guys they are - do not seem to give a flying fuck about these bots or account spammers; either because they genuinely don't care or they don't think it worths the efforts. Their servers probably got hundred thousands of users, probably hundred thousand minus a few hundred of them bots, but it causes no - known - harm. I have asked repeatedly several times for some server side measurements and at least some viable command line admin tools, if not the web UI but got no relevant response (apart from a ruby script which could delete one account given on command line, whihch is okay, except, horribly suboptimal).

So I have created for myself some #SQL's to query the database, and I'll throw some here. Still, the results probably have to be fed, one by one, that one specific script (this one with it's "detailed" installation and usage instructions) and hope that it does what it should.

Obviously I will have to automate it, and I surely will. I try to share those script somewhere, provided there is any demand for them. Basically what I will do is to remove all accounts which have logged in once and older than a week, maybe mixed in that having no posts at all, or not finishing the introductory phase. Using SQL and bash. From outside Disapora code. Which is ugly.

I do not think that's good. I am not happy with Diaspora today, this year, these years. I do not like to have spambot accounts. I can't see what the GRU needs them for, but I don't think they ever had any good motives, nor that they ever will.

Also, I may have missed what these accounts have done, or being doing. I see they have no posts, comments, likes and follows, but there may be some actions hidden from PostgreSQL. I just hope it's not fatal.

SQL

Registrations with the same IP:

SELECT current_sign_in_ip, COUNT(username)
  FROM users
  GROUP BY 1
  HAVING COUNT(username)>1
  ORDER BY 2 DESC;

Users with only one login and it's older than a week:

SELECT id, username, getting_started, language, email, 
        sign_in_count, last_sign_in_at, last_sign_in_ip, last_seen
  FROM users
  WHERE sign_in_count=1 AND last_seen+'1 day'::INTERVAL < NOW()
  ORDER BY last_seen ;

Comerade Spamov:

SELECT username, getting_started, language, email,
        sign_in_count, last_sign_in_at, last_sign_in_ip, last_seen
  FROM users
  WHERE last_sign_in_ip IN ('51.91.67.153','151.80.230.21','85.113.129.7','178.159.37.139')
  ORDER BY username;

The last one can be fed to awk { print $1 } and in turn fed to the spam.rb script, if I am able to make it run. And see what happens.