I know a lot of y'all don't use lj, but in case you do, there seems to be a bug that caused (is causing?) a security/privacy breach: multiple people have reported that when they try to edit their own entries/profile/inbox, they are taken to another random user's edit entries/profile/inbox page, and can see all of that user's flocked and private entries. Basically, the system seems to think that they're logged in as another user. Here are some of the early bug reports from last night:

cocanuts reports the logged-in-as-another-user bug
itsaserket reports the logged-in-as-another-user bug
rachelmanija reports the same bug (and also reports that it stopped happening to her) (ETA: she expanded on what the bug looked like in comments here)
nix_this reports the same bug (with other details in nix_this's lj)
kazzisato reports the same bug

... but there are a ton of comments on the lj releases post now; those are just the first reports of the problem that I saw. LJ staff have not yet commented to my knowledge, so all that there is so far is a series of bug reports - nobody seems to know the extent or scale of the problem, whether it was a temporary glitch that has already been fixed or whether it's ongoing, or basically any other details. I haven't seen any bug reports from users who noticed unauthorized access of their journals - just from people who noticed being logged in as someone else.

There's also an overview post about this lj bug at unfunnybusiness. There don't seem to be any suggestions for fixes yet, but the lj release entry for their recent code release has 800+ comments and is growing, and I haven't looked at everything. I haven't seen any reports on why it's happening, but some folks are suggesting that it might be related to an (unannounced) change in handling cookies that has also affected plugins like LJ Login and dreamwidth's comment importing.

Unfortunately, while you can tell pretty easily if you have access to the wrong journal (click edit entries, see what happens, if something goes wrong log out and log back in), so far there's no way to tell if anyone else has access to yours. Will ETA if I learn more.

ETA1: I haven't seen any bug reports from people who experienced the bug after mid-morning today UTC (but I could have just missed them) - if you know of any, please let me know and I'll ETA again. Now I've seen some more recent reports, so it hasn't stopped happening. I have also seen people reporting that it's no longer happening to them, though - rachelmanija, linked above, and wendelah1 in comments here.

ETA2: fallacy_angel took a screencap of the journal they were temporarily logged into; see also their comment at lj releases.

ETA3: Strike ETA1; I think dapperdinosaur is reporting the bug shortly after it happened to them, which makes a bug report from about 4:00 am UTC on the 27th.

ETA4: lorax experienced the bug at about 3:15 pm UTC on the 26th, and wrote up an detailed report of what the bug looked like plus some notes about lj's response.

ETA5: In the comments here, silveraspen describes the response to their pm to a site staffer (at 2:46 pm UTC on the 27th) which suggested that info was going to go up at lj_maintenance soonish.

ETA6: There's a new lj maintenance post that describes the problem: they're saying that it didn't allow people to edit other users' pages, just view them, so it wasn't a security risk. (This is one of the times when I facepalm about lj's communication - site security vs security of people's info would maybe have been a good thing to mention there.) They also describe it as a bug that lasted for only three minutes - while it's true that most of the bug reports I saw were clustered around the same time period, I've also seen a couple more recent reports, so that seems ... unlikely.

ETA7: Make that a really recent one - here's snailbones's report of the problem happening after that lj maintenance post was made.

ETA8: This is the first instance I've seen of someone saying that they actually did something with the account they were logged into (I think - it's somewhat confusingly worded, so definitely grain of salt here), plus some discussion of how long the problem was happening: misstiajournal's comment at the lj maintenance post.

ETA9: moropus also reports that they accidentally commented as another user when they experienced the bug (note that the comment also has anti-Russian sentiment)

ETA10: siljamus talks about things to do to minimize the risk of this happening to your journal, which mostly involve logging out of all of your livejournal login sessions, and then not logging back in at all (which includes not crossposting from dw).

ETA11: I haven't seen a live report of the bug since snailbones's, linked above, at 9:38 pm UTC on the 27th. Anyone else seen anything? Yup, other people have seen something - see ETA14.

ETA12: LJ mentioned the problem in passing in their most recent lj news update; many of the comments are angry about the in-passing remark, wording, challenge the details, etc.

ETA13: rachelmanija describes what the bug looked like (what she could see, how long it lasted).

ETA14: strike ETA11; majoline reports seeing the bug (or a different bug?) at about 3:30 pm UTC on 10/29. This bug report is different, though - they were taken to the edit entries page of a journal entry they clicked on, not to a random journal. No word on whether they could do anything on that page. majoline commented to say that the buttons were grayed out and couldn't be clicked on.

ETA15: It turns out that anyone can see anyone else's edit-entry page for a public post by putting in their username and the number of the entry; it only works for public posts, and it grays out the boxes and nothing can be clicked on. So a misdirected link could send someone there, and so could I if I manually entered it, and etc. darkspirited1 and xenotaku have been figuring out the parameters of how this works in a comment thread. The existence of this weird UI is irritating, because it means that the cache error(?) bug and this thing might be described in the same way by a user. The important differences seem to be that in the cache error, someone appeared to be logged in as someone else, so the edit entry page would appear normally but with someone else's data (buttons appeared pushable, someone else's username and icon, etc), whereas in this edit entry page looks weird and unusuable (buttons and text greyed out, at the top it looks like you're trying to edit a post in a community: [yourusername] in community [otherjournalname]).

ETA16 I just saw another new bug report on lj maintenance of something weird that looks a bit like the original bug circa 4:53 pm UTC 10/29. Their comment with screencaps got marked suspicious, but since the comment was emailed to me I saw the screencap, and they said I could link it here: screencap of the post entries page as snowsoftsong. It looks like the post entries page as if someone else was viewing it - there was no "in community..." or anything and the entry page wasn't greyed out - except that the username was snowsoftsong, and the original poster of that post was alwaystheheart in a different comm. So: WEIRD.

(Almost) everything I've linked to in this post is a single user's bug report or description of their issues - I have no way of checking the veracity of anyone's comments.

1. misdirected email:

Good Afternoon [name], Thank you for registering for Friday’s Anonymous Sexual Addictions workshop.

Hey, facilitator dude, how about checking the email addresses before you send them? OR here's a thought: don't put anyone's name in your email! Then if it gets misdirected, nobody will know who was supposed to get it! And nobody will have been inadvertently outed! Just a thought.

Anyway, I can't decide if that was the worst (in the sense of most embarrassing or potentially harmful) misdirected email I've ever received, so I have made a poll:



2. joy: someone linked to this photo on tumblr, and it made me go all happy and awww. Because it is adorable!



That's Criminal Minds' Matthew Gray Gubler (Spencer Reid) on the left, and Shemar Moore (Derek Morgan) on the right. I have no idea where or when it was taken -- because, you know, tumblr -- so I sadly can't go and look for other pictures that might also include Kirsten Vangsness grinning. Criminal Minds turned into a different (worse) show in its last few seasons, but listen, Morgan still has my HEART. Okay, he and Garcia are sharing it. Anyway: just look at those grins, awwwwww.

3. photo-spread misogyny: Apparently Vogue did a fashion editorial spread on a Spider-Man theme. It is like, here are the films (and a lot of the comics) in a nutshell: Mary Jane is menaced by various villains with phallic bits to their costumes while wearing designer dresses and looking beautiful and unconscious/threatened/withdrawn. It's all right, guys, Peter Parker will save her!

4. tv: Lately I have been watching The Sarah Jane Adventures? I started at the beginning after I watched the one with ( casting spoilers! ), which was awesome and made me go \o/. And mostly it is a great mood-improver and full of happiness. They save the world with hugs and talking about their feelings and hand-holding! Rani and Maria and Luke and Clyde are adorable! Sarah Jane is awesome and has issues and backstory! They are a FAMILY. That saves the world and talks about aliens and emotions and love. If only most of the villains weren't evil lady-types, and if only the good guys didn't do that awful Smallville-esque targeted amnesia shit, I would have basically my ideal show.

5. Avatar: The Last Airbender: You might've seen this already, but just in case, did you guys see such_heights's post in white_lotus about an Avatar: The Last Airbender gift exchange? inkstone suggested the exchange + the lunar new year posting dates, and a bunch of people said they were interested, so it looks like it will happen! Fanfic, fanart, fanvids, etc all accepted. So if you have preferences for style/rules/etc, plz comment at that post; we're going to try to get rules up in a couple of days so that we can do signups before the end of November. \o/ ATLA exchange!

1. Are you, too, frustrated by the new lj facebook and twitter connect buttons under your comments? Fear not, for not one but two people have made magical solutions! Do not mess with tab order or people shall make greasemonkey scripts, lj. These solutions only fix your view of the page and your tab-order; other people in your journal will still see the facebook/twitter options, and will be able to crosspost their comments.

Option one: daluci wrote a greasemonkey script that takes away all the facebook/twitter connect buttons. Yay! It only works on the quick-comment page, though, not on the full reply page. ETA: Now it works for all comment pages! People are awesome.

Option two: chagrined describes a partial solution using stylish here. This is useful for: people who use stylish (me!), people who have javascript turned off on lj (also me!) because the above greasemonkey script only works on the java-enabled quick comment boxes. Sadly, however, it still leaves "settings" the first tab select after the comment box. Me: tab-enter ... oh damn. NARGH.

2. While I am linking to greasemonkey scripts for livejournal, I also really love daluci's bannering script. It turns the lj header back into a beautiful quiet blue bar. Against which I can read the text. Sometimes it gets a little wonky over on the right, depending on what lj has done with the custom header, but I just adblock the second lj logo and call it done.

3. Yesterday sineala linked to some macros that astolat made in like 2007 that I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere, so I thought I would signal boost them. It's a set of fanfiction conversion macros for Microsoft Word; they turn a story or post written in Word into pretty html or plain text, surrounding italicized text by html tags and stuff like that. (I can't tell from the post itself whether they also fix inappropriate characters like smart quotes and em dashes, but they might.) ETA: sineala confirms in comments that the macros fix em dashes and smart quotes and other special characters.

Listen, my mom told me that this sort of thing couldn't happen. And I was a lot happier when I believed that. Eeep.

... *flops* I just caught up with the last kink_bingo signups, and thingswithwings landed and found the internet and therefore I too have ( a kink bingo card )

But I haven't thought about it because I've been answering comments instead.

I have, however, thought about this robot plushie, and decided that it is pretty adorable but needs a mouth.

Here is a thing that makes me really sad: this sign [note: link contains image of Holocaust victims], at the anti-health care march in Washington D.C. today. Which, okay, is horrifying enough as a piece of political rhetoric, if you presume that the people in question don't believe in it, it's horrifying enough as a parallel between mostly-white mostly-Christian Americans who don't want health care and, you know, the torture and deaths of Jewish and Romani and homosexual folks, but what really horrifies and depresses me is the idea that the person holding that sign, the person waving that sign around, might not just be doing it as political rhetoric, might actually believe in that comparison. How horrifying is it to think about the mostly-white mostly-Christian mostly-conservative anti-health care folks imagining themselves to be the same as Jews and Romani and queer folks in Nazi Germany? To think about what they must believe to make this comparison in all seriousness? To make the comparison between socialized medicine and genocide? I am just "..."

Also, linking to the above at Think Progress reminded me of how much I hate reading comments on progressive blogs. I skim the front pages of a number of progressive blogs, and I usually don't read the comments -- there are so few blogs that think about intersectionality, that really try to keep out the misogyny and the homophobia and the transmisogyny and the racism and the ablism. I read the comments on this post about a racist sign in an Georgia bar a while ago, though, and just -- this is exactly it, this is exactly the problem. Here are some things I learned about the TRUTH about racism from reading comments, which I have put ( behind a cut because they hit just about every -ism ever )

is, of course, about zombies.

PS: Hi guys! I'm still in the middle of nowhere! I still rarely have the internet and when I do it's slow! (Note the above text-only version of the BBC.)

1) So, the tea party protests. Okay, so, there's a lot to be said about the fakeness of it, about the way it makes little to no sense, about the Fox News promotions of the tea parties. But what bothers me most of all? Is how some proponents of the parties are calling it teabagging. Like, mostly, they stick to "tea party," but occasionally there's a teabagging or two, and seriously, guys, that's not what I think of when I hear the word teabagging.

Fortunately, Rachel Maddow has already attempted to get through a description of the teabagging tea parties without laughing, and failed miserably, so I don't feel alone in this:

2) The National Organization for Marriage -- an anti-gay-rights group -- is starting a new campaign. It is about how lots of people are against gay marriage. They are calling it "2 Million for Marriage." They are abbreviating it 2M4M. Which, hmm, M4M stands for Men for Men -- there's actually even a dating website named M4M, so it's not exactly UNDERGROUND SLANG. And, even better, 2M4M is when you're a couple looking for another guy to have sex with. Well DONE, National Organization for Marriage! (They also forgot to register possible variations of their domain name, such that 2M4M.org now points to a pro-gay-marriage site.)

thingswithwings and I were talking about early R&B songs about unhealthy relationships -- there are kind of a lot. And it reminded me of this Sesame Street routine, which freaked me the fuck out when I was, whatever, five. Which I will now share with you and you should totally watch:

I still find this amazingly creepy. YOU GUYS. THE MUPPET LETTER U IS FEELING UP SMOKEY ROBINSON AND PINNING HIS HANDS TO HIS SIDES. OH GOD. BAD TOUCH.

And they even rewrote the song so that he doesn't seem to like it at all -- in the original, at least he's conflicted? But here he's like "aaah I am being chased by a giant muppet letter U."

I checked out some of the youtube comments, and discovered that other kids about my age found it completely horrifying: there are comments from people who say "I used to hide when this clip showed on Sesame Street" and "this gave me the creeps" and "I always thought the U was trying to choke him!"

In conclusion, this is at least as freaky now as it was when I was five. Who could possibly have thought this was a good idea?

Things that are awesome:

1) Episode 1x04 of Jeremiah, in which Luke Perry plays Jeremiah and JASON PRIESTLY plays an evil warlord who captures Jeremiah and Kurdy and wants to convert them. Thus, Jason Priestly and Luke Perry have intense conversations at each other while wearing flak jackets. As I said to thingswithwings, it's like Beverly Hills Post-Apocalyptico over here. (I don't much like Jeremiah so far, actually, because I hate daddy issues, but that was hilarious. I'm conflicted about the show, because I like the concept, and I like some of the characters, but the letters to daddy? Geez.)

Side note: Today's episode of Jeremiah features a really scruffy Ladon Radim. Oh Vancouver!

2) Revisiting these parts of past seasons of SGA. m_shell's joy as she goes through the seasons is reminding me of how much I enjoy the John Sheppard Is Really Gay show.

3) Zombie gingerbread men cookie cutters. Srsly.