rawTOP

Look at your profile page

The Fediverse / ActivityPub / Mastodon won’t work because the content can be blocked by other instances and because the content will be on a server that can be shut down by unfriendly governments. Nostr would fix that. Its design is virtually censorship-proof. But adopting it for this community will take thought and energy.

IMPORTANT UPDATE! For starters… Oklahoma has been added to the block list (their law went into effect November 1st), and… If you're using Apple Private Relay you may need to turn it off since it doesn't route through a local IP when you tell it to. (I encounter problems from NYC.) But neither of those is as important as the update on the Free Speech Coalition lawsuit… Oral arguments in Free Speech Coalition v Paxton, the Texas age-verification case, have been scheduled to take place on January 15, 2025 before the U.S. Supreme Court. Free Speech Coalition and co-plaintiffs are represented by the American Civil Liberties Union and Quinn Emmanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, LLP. What that means is that some time this spring (as late as June) SCOTUS will render a decision which could (best case) invalidate all the laws which are forcing me to implement these blocks. But they could also uphold the law - which is a worst case scenario. We'll know A LOT more end of day on January 15 - after the oral arguments are done. Hopefully the justices' questions and comments will hint which way they're leaning. While you may be expecting the worst - when it comes to free speech issues - conservatives can surprise you. The core argument is that age verification is highly intrusive and not particularly effective (given VPNs) and there are less intrusive ways that would achieve a result that's as good or better. So fingers crossed. Either way - I'm beginning to think about a Plan B. With yesterday's election results, communities like this will be under increasing attack.

Looks like the site was down for ~5 hrs. (oops!) Turns out I forgot to renew my (DDOS-protected) DNS hosting… I just renewed it for 2 years, so that won't happen again anytime soon.

If you want to read one of the amicus briefs for the Supreme Court case, here’s one… https://myadultattorney.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/23-1122-EFF-Amicus-Brief.pdf That one is a combo effort by EFF and Woodhull - both are great organizations!

This should be fixed as of yesterday. Sorry. It amounted to a dumb oversight.

Please try again. I think I may have fixed it, but not sure.

The 6th Circuit has overturned the stay in Indiana, so in a moment I'll be blocking Indiana. The court's logic was "weird"… Yes, age verification is probably unconstitutional But because the Supreme Court allowed a similar law to be enforced pending appeal, we'll let the Indiana law to be enforced. Meanwhile the case is on hold until SCOTUS rules on the Texas case

There were a few weeks when my server got on one (of many) block lists. If your mail provider uses that block list you would have been affected. It looks like it started around July 19th and was resolved the first week of August. But it looks like the server got blacklisted again a couple days ago. I've submitted a request to get off, but need to look into how it's happening. Hopefully I can find some time the next day or so to pour over a mail log and look for things that are suspicious. Anyway, email sent during a block doesn't get resent. It just never gets to you. So in the case of registration, you'll need to re-register.

There are many geoIP data providers. There's no universal source for that data. You need to look at what MalePrime says your location is (see the screenshot a few messages up). The other thing is… I see you're on IPv6. This site only uses IPv4. So that's not even the IP we're using - we're using a different one. You've used 4 different IPv4s in the past 2 weeks… That's using BZ's internal geoIP lookup, which is NOT the same data source as what I use to do the redirects. But unless you've been traveling that's showing 4 different locations, 3 different states. But even Indiana wouldn't get you blocked since FSC got an injunction for that state. But the data provider I'm using may have put you somewhere else completely. This is common with mobile providers - they move IPs all over the place and sometimes let you hold onto one as you move around. So it's significant that you're connecting via AT&T. You'd probably have fewer issues on something like cable-based wifi in your house. A lot of you know that I had a stroke last year. That slowed me down a lot. Then in December I figured out I had mild to moderate case of Long Covid and that I had it for over a year (at that point - pushing 2 years now). It took me a while to be seen by specialists, get the diagnosis, and understand what I needed to do to get better. But that's happening now. The problem is (and why I'm mentioning it here) that sitting and working at my computer actually drains my energy reserves quite a bit, so I'm getting almost no programming done. I'm far better than I was 3 month ago, and starting to see signs that in the next few months computer work will be more possible. When that happens one of my first projects will be to upgrade that page on Male Prime that you see so that mobile users can basically say "your data is wrong, here let my device tell you my lat/long…" Then I'll figure out what state that is, and let you in and whitelist that Class C range for the following week. But first I need to get better… As far as IPv6… geoIP lookups are even more difficult and unreliable for IPv6 than they are for IPv4. It's pretty safe to say everyone in a class C range is near each other, so if I have the location for one IP in the Class C, I can (fairly) safely assume the others are close by. But IPv6 is far more complicated. Let me try to break it down for you… Your IPv6 is/was 2600:0387:000f:5b16:0:0:0:0002 The first 4 segments (2600:0387:000f:) are your "network address", the portion after that… well, it depends on how your ISP set things up. An entire company (or ISP) can all be on the same network address. From a legal compliance standpoint it's fairly safe to say that everyone at a particular network address is at least routed through a single location, but the laws don't specify how their routed, but rather the physical location of the user. AND there's no equivalent of a Class C. You have to know the location of each and every network address - and there are BILLIONS of them!

SCOTUS has just agreed to hear Free Speech Coalition’s challenge of the Texas AV law. So by this time next year we should have some sort of resolution to the legal questions. But given the make-up of the court, it may just lead to more AV laws. But at least things will be less up in the air. This is why who you vote for matters - they determine the make-up of the court…