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NCommander is publishing a Meta story today: https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=22/11/20/0342250 It will be published on the front page with all of the restrictions that apply to such stories and discussions.
In it NCommander explains how he sees the future of the site developing with regards to software, hardware and administration. Some of those views are different now from the views that many of us held in 2014. The requirement for some of our servers is no longer justified, and there are better technologies available for achieving what we are trying to do thus also reducing our running costs. The administration of the site is placing an increasing burden on the relatively few administrators that remain in the support team. Society has also changed. Some discussion has been replaced by intimidation and threats. It is much more polarised than it was in 2014. In many ways this is the same as for numerous other web sites. However, the abuse and toxic atmosphere created by a small number of Anonymous Cowards is unacceptable and must be reversed if the site is to survive. The responsibility for some of the problems that we are experiencing, and the resulting actions that we have had to take, is placed entirely at their feet.
A few months ago the majority of the community opted - albeit very reluctantly - to remove AC posts from the front pages of the site. This action has successfully removed the vast majority of the abuse from our discussions. We are seeing a slow increase in the number of comments week-on-week and the signal-to-noise ratio is now much higher. It is only right that we also reconsider the implications of that change.
This journal entry is to enable anyone who wishes to remain anonymous to express their views. I promise that I will read it and will ensure that genuine views are considered when the community decides which path it wishes to follow. I cannot make any assurances that other members of the site's administration will read it - although I expect that at least some will. If you have an account then I strongly encourage you to leave your views under NCommander's Meta story and not here.
I further my promise that I will try to represent your views as honestly and fairly as I can.
If you abuse this journal then you are simply giving more support to the alternative options that might be considered than you are to the status quo. I encourage you to expresses sensible, logical and considered views but should you decide that abuse is what you prefer then this journal entry can simply be removed. You are being given an opportunity - do not throw it away.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2022, @09:29AM (11 children)
1. I absolutely agree on getting rid of MySQL NDB cluster. Your setup (if you left it the way it was setup the last time you all discussed it) is not set up for high availability and is actually worse than a standard setup at this point in a number of measures.
2. You mention FastCGI and getting rid of Apache completely. I based on that, you probably mean using FastCGI from the nginx front(s). That change will probably end up having some interesting effects on the rehash instances running. I would definitely try that on the dev server before putting anything like that on the actual website.
3. Speaking of the the dev server. I again implore you and the admins to turn on code coverage for rehash on the dev server. I don't think you all have an accurate picture of what is going on there and you seem like you'll be much more accepting of that idea for a number of reasons.
4. Definitely try upgrading mod_perl first before doing an FCGI transition. I probably don't need to tell you how to do that, but I would definitely have some coverage information and your mod_perl CHANGES ready!
5. Love the Docker or other container plan and walling off with a proper LSM. Even just the containerization is great because it should ease scaling if this place takes off or for those curious in the future who want to play around.
6. At this point, it isn't a surprise that the no-AC decision will stick. It saddens me in a way and I know it has already driven off a number of SME contributors to this site. We already laugh at some of the incorrect information that has sailed by unchallenged and it soured me (and probably us) from contributing where such comments are allowed. I get why the decision is made and how we got here, but it is what it is.
7. I don't know how well your IP ban idea will work. IP addresses are disposable and any properly motivated and armed spammer can have near endless numbers of IPs to evade even those bans.
8. In all honesty, I don't know if this site even has the resources to fend of the truly motivated and armed attacker. Aristicratus and his claimants seems to be doing so more for the lulz than anything and doesn't really seem to be the best armed. Otherwise, this site would have been toast a long time ago given that it was and is rife with vulnerabilities.
9. Deleting comments is fine enough. It is your site and I get some things (e.g. CSAM) should be banished from the Internet. The only real problem I have is there is no real accountability on them. This place has always tried to maintain some semblance of transparency, but there really seems to be none in this area. There is no public list of actions taken, spam mods dealt, comments deleted, etc. Who is watching the watchers is always a valid question, especially when they claim the need for more obtrusive powers.
10. I also find such talk a bit ironic given that the journal pages are full of literal spam of many types that does nothing but hurt the reputation of this site, both technically and socially, and that there has been repeated refusals to do anything about that.
11. I may trust your intentions while questioning your underlying motivation, but the ride has been interesting so far.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2022, @10:09AM (3 children)
A few I forgot that others came up with: add a watchdog for slashd, at a minimum, so that way most hiccups are fixed without admin intervention. Fix your mail server, add proper DNS entries, and clean up its reputation. Fix your DNS SOA, add a TSIG for let’s encrypt if you haven’t already so you don’t have to fret about that either, and think about deploying DANE for extra points.
Play your cards right and document everything and this dinosaur could be a model for those trying to build their own in the future.
(Score: 2) by fab23 on Monday November 21 2022, @04:35PM (2 children)
What I can see from outside, the mail server is running, it sure may have some missing parts yet, as it was rebuilt from scratch. It has a proper hostname with corresponding PTR, A, AAAA and MX DNS entries even with DNSSEC enabled. Also a SPF TXT record is present. And it has a (still valid) certificate from Let's Encrypt.
Unfortunately its IPv4 address is listed in some DNS Block Lists, I will send details to the team.
I do not know all the details on how they are currently renewing the LE certificate. I only know that they have a wildcard certificate and so need to do this through DNS challenge and are doing it kind of manually.
For my personal infrastructure I already have it fully automated. But it took a quite long time to improve it and fix little things, mostly in the process afterwards to distribute the certificates to all needed systems and services. I have created an acme.example.com subdomain where my ACME tool (go-acme/lego) is able to create the temporary entries for the challenge. All domains, for which I am responsible to create certificates, have a _acme-challenge CNAME entry in their domain (e.g. in example.net) pointing to a corresponding example-net.acme.example.com name. The acme.example.com subdomain is only on one server (in my case the same where lego is running), so there is no delay with the distribution to all other name servers.
Regarding DANE (IN TLSA DNS entries) it is not so easy any more since using certificates from LE, as they have to be renewed quite often. I did had DANE entries in the past when still using certificates from commercial CA with validity of 1 year and even longer. To add / modify the multiple TLSA entries you already need to have the signed certificate to create the needed checksum/hash. Then you need to add the new entries and still keep the old ones. Then you need to wait until all the TTLs for the TLSA entries have expired and then you can deploy the new certificate to all services and reload/restart them. After that you can remove the TLSA entries for the old certificate.
I was already thinking about this, but to automate it, it is a major undertaking and currently probably not worth the effort as almost no software checks for this entries.
(Score: 2) by fab23 on Monday November 21 2022, @08:36PM
This was a false alarm and the IPv4 address of mail.soylentnews.org is clean and not listed in any DNB BLs checked. This affected BLs are offline since a few years, but my check when run in shell did report them, but when used through Nagios it did not report any failure. So in the end it helped me to also improve my own infrastructure as I did found an updated version of this check.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 22 2022, @12:17AM
It is possible for this site to fully automate their usage of LE, which is what the TSIG is for. Because SN is using BIND, you can use TSIG to alter the _acme-challenge DNS entries in a secure manner without affecting anything else in the zone.
As a bonus, it also allows you to create the TLSA entries for the new certs and delete the old ones, again in a secure manner without affecting anything else on the zone. Your deployment script can handle all of that for you, and there are a couple of examples out there (I think ARIN or USCERT have one) and I know people who do so at scale already using such a script. The basic process is to start certbot. It can use its TSIG mode to create the proper challenge entries and get the wildcard certificate. Your deployment script generates the hash for whatever TLSA entry you chose. You use TSIG to add the new TLSA record. You wait 2.5 times your DNS value (which would be 2.5 hours according to the current SOA but you could do 2 days for safety). Then you add the new certificates and keys to nginx and remove the old ones. Then you reload nginx, being sure to wait for the reloads to actually complete. Then you can safely delete the old TLSA record using TSIG because you can be assured no one is relying on it.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Monday November 21 2022, @10:47AM (6 children)
Thanks for your comments. I'll leave the hardware points to someone more qualified than I am to answer them. (With the caveat that I cannot guarantee that anyone with the answers will read this journal)
The function of the dev server is diverse. It is used for training, it is used for testing software (and trying to crash the system) and, like the main site, it hasn't been updated in several years. We can currently reset it to a safe configuration very quickly after breaking it - either by testing or letting new trainees loose on it!
There are several issues here. One is that I agree with you hence the reason I wrote: https://soylentnews.org/meta/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=52490&page=1&cid=1280770#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]
I do propose strict controls on comment deletion - I have stated quite clearly that it must be a last resort, that no single individual should be able to do it alone (at least 2 admins, maybe more), and that the system must record who/why/when. But we cannot show you the content that was deleted. If it was child pornography (1 attempt in the last 4 months) or doxing information (numerous actual examples over the last 3 years) then we are guilty of publishing that information. We are committing an offence. In fact, if we identify the comment too closely some people would find it on the WayBack machine or some other long term repository.
If we open up the site database to public scrutiny - ALL the private data gets compromised as well. There are pages which show staff exactly who has moderate whom with a spam moderation - or indeed any significant down moderation. There are pages containing the private data and full history of each account. If you had access to these pages then you would also have access to private information again. If you don't trust the staff to manage it then there there is nothing else we can do. We also believe that bans are between the site and the person being banned. If you think that the community should be informed then raise it as a discussion point, even as a submission.
New pages that could display some data releasable to the public can only be created by a programmer. We haven't had one for over 12 months, and he stopped doing any significant tasks long before that.
Do you mean the comments within a specific journal, or the numerous journals that are created by fake accounts? The former is what ACs asked for - somewhere unregulated where they could discuss whatever they wanted. The fact that they rely on somebody with an account to create a topic, or that they can't moderate them because ACs just can't, apparently didn't occur to some of them. I am not wasting my mod points on the journals. I have posted stories in the journals - they have been trashed and ridiculed. We will see how this one fares.
AC's were the ones trashing the stories on the front page. I know that they were a minority - but it was sufficient to cause long-term damage to the site's reputation. I have repeatedly said that I wish we could revert back to what we had. For that people must change - not the management of the site.
The latter problem I have suggested a fix for - delete the false accounts if they are not used. They never ever get enough karma to appear in the list of journals displayed on the front page.
Currently, there is no mechanism for administrators to make changes to any journals or the comments in them - they are controlled entirely by their creator. The software will have to be changed to make such a thing possible. We might be in a position to do that in a few weeks/months time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2022, @07:03PM (4 children)
Bans and removed content must have transparency if you want to call this site a community.
The old admin had multiple accusations of misconduct with one example that stuck around for years before recently being exposed. If it was truly a code bug then it should have been investigated even if not fixed. Trust is a necessary component with a centralized site, so without compromising user's private info the actions if admins should be as transparent as possible.
PS: I am not aristarchus, update your mental model instead of assuming they are the only user critical of the site.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Monday November 21 2022, @08:27PM (3 children)
Why must bans have transparency? They are issued for anything from inappropriate moderation (starting with a 1 week ban for a first offence and doubling for each repeated offence) to doxing and threats of violence. Why does everyone need to know that somebody was overzealous in moderating a specific individual - either positively or negatively?
If someone gets ticketed by the police for having a faulty bulb in their vehicle's sidelights you do not expect to see it reported nationwide in the press and television, do you?
As editors have not yet got the ability to remove content - the only method identified so far is a kludge that has a poor user interface - then the procedures and subsequent publication of such actions has not even been considered yet.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2022, @11:01PM (1 child)
Never heard of the show COPS?
The post assumed preserving privacy. Shame is the only tool for the social media problem. Users here can be anonymous as possible here, as you repeatedly point out, so what is the big deal? Also, any records from arrests to tickets are easily found. Actions taken by you or other staff? A black hole, near impossible to prove. If you want trust you have to be OPEN. Trust, but verify!
Here I thought the discussion was about possibilities and options. Slow your roll big guy.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 20 2023, @07:18AM
There is only one aristarchus. One soylentil to rule them all, one soylentil to find them, one soylentil to troll the rest, and in the Darkness Bind them. Obviously, using bind is the problem. That and the pervasive paranoia. Only one aristarchus? Have you no herd that there is an Aristarchus Collective? Hundreds of thousands of aristarchoi, on the internets, all attacking poor little SN at the same time, possibly using Low Orbit Ion Cannons, for all intense porporsies. The real problem is managerial. The eds should never have listened to Runaway. aristarchus knows that everything he claimed is false, and this makes his Wholey Juggalo against SoylentNews trice holey. Will the facts ever come out? Will Runaway ever admit to all the things he has openly admitted here on soylentnews, like the number and caliber of his weapons, the displacement of his motorcycle, his (dubious) military service, and where he grows his beans? Rags, the dog's name is Rags. Too many details, Runaway. You are toast.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 15 2022, @12:59AM
On the Internet, nobody knows that aristarchus is banned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2022, @11:02PM
I understand it is a balancing act between accountability and revealing negative data that only assist those with bad agendas. But there are processes to fix what you are complaining about. If someone reports a post or the admins find a bad content have a standard process to delete the post.
Roughly: prevent the live comment from being displayed, report the material to either NCMEC (Hopefully you all do remember you are required to submit CSAM to NCMEC) or the FBI (hopefully you remember to submit required tips to the FBI too) or the anti-spam groups, notify the legitimate archive services to remove the posts there as well (which they do). After acknowledgement by the responsible authority, the comment is deleted completely and purged from tainted backups, after acknowledgement from the archive services, log that the comment was deleted. The only slow part in the chain is the archive services but even they are pretty fast once they know you don't do spurious reports.
I'm also not saying to open the entire database to public scrutiny. Again, there is a balancing act. But Trust requires transparency. There is a reason for sunshine laws and the various exceptions to them after all. There is a balance to be reached and I personally think that it is closer to the fully-open side than the fully-closed side. I also understand they require a programmer, but you have one that is literally volunteering his time and will have to make much more drastic changes than just adding a template or two and a few SQL calls. Y'all asked for thoughts and NCommander originally brought up the idea of expanding the deleting and other powers of the admins, so there you go: a suggestion.
Lastly, I meant the actual spam posts in journals. I get that certain companies are paid to spread the word far and wide about AC companies, for example. But they don't do the site any good. In fact they hurt the website. Real life users may never see them, but I guarantee the search engines, spam monitors, and other bots do. And they react accordingly.