SoylentNews

You will all now be aware that there are changes afoot to the management and structure of SoylentNews. Many of you are pleased to see that some action is being taken, and in many ways I also support that concept. But it is obvious to me that many of you don't understand the possible implications of what is currently happening. I would like to discuss this further. First, it is necessary to have some background.

The Board

The Board of SoylentNews was created very early on in the site's life and originally comprised of 3 people. NCommander, Matt Angel, and mrcoolbp (aka Ben Prentice). Ben stepped down many years ago from his post as Board Secretary, which was a role that covered many different things. So for at least 6 years, the Board has comprised of only 2 people. Matt Angel does not, as far as I know, have a nickname on this site. He is the Board Treasurer; a job he has done quietly and efficiently in the background. NCommander you should all know well by now.

You may think that the Board is there to look after your interests, but nowhere in the founding documents or bye-laws does it say any such thing. One of its primary duties is to look after the interests of the shareholders. They do not have to consult the community, or inform them of any decisions that they make, nor are they accountable to any other external authority or individual. They do not have to provide you with written records. They should provide direction to the site but not be involved in any aspect of how that is achieved or managed. There are 2 shareholders - NCommander and Matt Angel. You can read into that anything you wish. I am not telling you what to think, I am simply telling you something that many of us only learned relatively recently.

The Board can, however, wind up the site without any consultation or prior warning. That is entirely within their powers and legal rights.

The Hardware

Since the site began it has been hosted on Linode (now part of Akamai) hardware. It is not the cheapest around but you get what you pay for. The hardware has been managed by the sysops team, the names of whom you will also know and you have seen them commenting on the site recently. There were multiple people who had need of access to the hardware starting at the top with NCommander. Ideally, the sysops team would all have individual specialities and areas of responsibility, but that is simply not possible for a small team such as we have had for several years. Therefore they all contribute where they can to address whatever issues they must attend to.

There are some advantages to this arrangement. There are checks and balances that what is being implemented is sensible and will not adversely affect other areas of the system. If it does, they can each be aware of the problem areas and they can be addressed logically and systematically to bring the work to a conclusion. This requires communication, trust and access to the hardware.

The Data

The data I am referring to is the database which, in addition to your individual personal and account data, contains every story, journal, moderation, comment etc. The most valuable asset that this site has is its community. Without it there is simply no site. And the most important asset from the community's point of view is the data that has been accumulated. It is so valuable that we have alway pledged to protect it to the fullest extent possible. We have successfully done this for over 9 years.

The Third Person

Kolie approached, or was approached by, the Board to be contracted to provide new hardware to host a containerised site. He is for the moment a contractor. He has been generous in providing the hardware that has been gathered so far for free. Nobody other than the Board or kolie himself knows what exactly is in that contract. They are not obliged to reveal it to us, and this is perfectly normal and legal. I am not suggesting that anything otherwise.

Kolie is the CTO of several companies, the one that he has discussed most of all is Ennwise (ennwise.com) but there is also an Ennwise consulting company too, and probably others. The hardware that he is currently using is located in Ennwise company facilities (Freemont, CA, FMT2 facility. Linux OS on a iSCSI array.) but it is being moved later on this month. I do not know where to. He describes the company as "Ennwise is more accurately a consulting, custom software, and MSP/ISP" and "[...] ennwise mostly does vCIO work for businesses in the 1-10B range". He describes himself as "I'm in vc, tech, construction verticals so it's basically a product of lessons learned in focusing on your product and not managing servers." He therefore has an abundance of relevant experience and seems to have made a successful career out of it.

Some Missing Pieces

This site has always been entirely open in its dealings with the community. Many of us know each other at an almost personal level. We do not usually hide what we have done or are planning to do - in fact we often consult with the community beforehand to get a majority approval. There are some things that must be kept private - handling you personal data is one of them. I make no apologies for having withheld personal data belonging to one person from others who do not need to know it. Some time back I was given a copy of our policy document from 2014 after somebody managed to recover it before it was lost for ever. It was published in the site Wiki and was there for everyone to read. I am proud to say that I do not know of any contraventions to the policy decisions stated in it. The privacy passage in particular has never be contravened.

As a contractor kolie is perfectly entitled to keep the details of his contract private. He does no have to share it with anyone. But to be a valid contract I believe that there must be a payment of some kind - either monetary or in kind. Otherwise it is not a contract but an obligation or promise. If it is monetary then it might have been paid for by your subscriptions. Although that places no obligation on the Board I would have hoped that, being the community that we are, somebody would have at least mentioned it. They do not have to seek your approval for a payment but it would seem to be a reasonable action to be made aware of it. This is purely a personal view. If it is not monetary, then what is it? What reward will kolie receive for the expensive hardware that is being procured to run the site? I have acknowledged that so far it appears to be costing us nothing but that does not guarantee it will always be that way in the future. I will return to this point later.

kolie has told us that there are 'milestones' built within the contract that trigger the next stage of activity, and presumably a partial payment. Again this is simply a guess because I am not party to exactly what the contract says. None of us are.

The Potential Problem

At the moment the entire future of this site rests in the hands of the Board, and in particular NCommander. I understand exactly where he is coming from in wanting to see his work move forward into the future. But during the last month or so that future has been uncertain with statements from 'I am closing the site down' to 'the site will continue and I am planning for the next 5 to 10 years'. And with each change we do not have to be consulted, your views do not matter, and it is causing a lot of damage to our community. I have been criticised for even raising some issues that I think have been obvious from the start but are unappreciated or simply not understood by many. I ask blunt questions and time is very short I expect to receive more criticism for this journal entry. The place were we are supposed to be able to raise topics that interest us personally.

I have no crystal ball. I cannot say what will happen in the future. I know that the first 'milestone' occurs towards the end of this month. That is only a few weeks away. And most people are sat back just waiting for it to happen. Let me tell you what could happen:

1. At the end of the month the new hardware is stood up and the site switches over to it. We don't know where that hardware will be, how secure an environment it will be in, what is the expected up-time, and how much it will cost to run it.

2. The 'milestone' reward might be that kolie will receive a seat on the Board for it. He has said that he gets a seat at some point but it is not clear when that might be. He is immediately elevated from contractor to Board Management. You do not have to approve that action or even be told about it taking place.

3. One person, now a Board member, has total control over the hardware. But unlike in the past where the access has been shared between the sysops team, which resulted in checks and balances, there is no indication that such access will be granted. We have been told by NCommander that there will be NO shell access to the new hardware. If the cost of access to the hardware for the community increases - perhaps a form of compulsory subscription fee - then there is little more you can do except to pay up or leave.

4. Your data, which we have protected for over 9 years, has also moved completely under the same person's control. We cannot copy it, you cannot change it, you have simply lost the right to control your data. In the EU this is already illegal, and it doesn't matter where the data is held. If it contains the data of EU people there are already existing laws in place. Once that data is gone, this site can never be recreated.

I repeat, I haven't got a crystal ball and cannot say what will happen. But I can say that once it has happened you have already lost everything. How that data is used will be for the Board to decide, not you. If they want to monetize it they can do so providing that they do not break US law in doing so. If they want the site to be covered in advertising they may do so. If they want to invite other 'investors' to join the Board they can do so. Unless community members are on the board then it is all over.

I have no reason to doubt koli's sincerity today, but I also never imagined that NCommander would just shut the site down as he intended to do. If koli's interests are rather more monetary than community spirited, then he may view things differently in the years ahead. Today he is working hard to create a site, and giving generously of his time and money, but it might not be the site you imagined it would be.

This is what some of you are enthusiastically cheering for. This is what I am trying to prevent. If it looks like it will happen then I cannot guarantee the safety of your data or influence what the site will become. This might be the most important time ever for you to say what you want to happen - even if they are not listening.

I don't care whether you think this journal is the right thing to do or not, or whether you think it is sour grapes or just stirring the pot - as long as you are no longer running blindly into the unknown then it will have served its purpose.

This is my community too.

Kolie and I have started dividing up the work to finish dealing with the worst of the critical infrastructure problems. At this point, I have Apache, Perl, and mod_perl building in Docker, with a good chunk of rehash's dependencies now installing. It's going to be a fair bit of work since at this point, a lot of the mystery meat aspects of the backend need to be detangled and at least reproducibly reinstalled, but at least there's some actual hope at seeing this site actually get its infrastructure updated.

I expect I'll have more to write about next week in that regard.

I intended to have a main page post following last Saturday's post about SN's averted shutdown, but after three attempts of trying to write it and it basically kept coming out as a copy and paste of the last posts I've written, I'm going to put that aside for the moment. Instead of simply repeating the same thing over and over, I'm just going to write a quick summary of what's been done

I've spun up a new development Linode account, and kolie put together the skeleton of an ansible playbook. I'm going to start hammering on it more tomorrow. The intent is to create a full staging environment for every aspect of the site. The playbook will also let us easily be able to do development locally as it will perfectly match what we're doing in production. That way things like configuration updates or even rehash code updates can be tested, deployed, and easily rolled back.

The first target is to rebuild the nginx terminator, as well as to use Traefik to help handle routing and termination. I re-installed the SSL terminator last November so its exact configuration is known and easy to recreate. Each component of the stack is going to get documented both via a playbook a wiki page on GitHub. After this, we'll start migrating services one by one until we can fully decommission the current VMs.

This also has the advantage that we will have something resembling change management, disaster recovery, and not deal with some strange part of the stack breaking when a configuration is updated which is always a good thing. It also means doing a large overhaul to rehash at least moves into the realm of "theorically possible", up from "impossible".

I'll try to keep people apprised of how things are progressing here every few days. I have no idea how long any of this will take, and even after the infrastructure rebuild is done, there's still a lot more that has to follow.

So the discussions on backchannels have continued, and I have written a 7k word document essentially bullet pointing everything that needs to be done. It covers both the technical and business side of SoylentNews. This document is being reviewed right now, and I'll likely post a revised version of it in the near future if conversations continue to go well.

This is that this document is my personal plan on how SN might be revamped. It wasn't written with consultation of the staff.

It includes a full list of remaining technical issues, action items to redraft and revise the business plan to solve the single revenue stream issue, establishment of true site governance, and finally, a high level look at what replacing rehash will look like.

This plan also includes a specific items to determine how I can be legally disentangled from the infrastructure, as well as the requirements in allowing legal responsibility for SN, which includes ongoing maintenance and more, to not be a burden simply left at one persons feet.

This is largely codification what I've been saying and trying to repair for the last few months.

There's also the very open question on if there are enough people in the community who are interested in working in this. The impression I had on IRC was there wasn't. The backchannels discussions which happened because I was approached as a human, have convinced me an alternative might exist.

If there's significant community involvement to essentially renovate and relaunch the site (and I mean this is people actually doing it under a specific plan that we can agree to), then the largest problem in keeping SN online can be solved.

I'll write more on this in a post I hope to have out on Monday, but I'm not going to sit here and leave you all in silence and let rumors build up over the weekend.

An update: There has been serious conversations in back channels relating to ongoing SN operations from outside parties who are not current SN staff. It is possible the shutdown will be averted, but at this point, it will require signing a contract with the PBC to, at minimum, handle ongoing IT and support for the servers for a period of time, and to finish migration to deployment automation services.

Past that, a more serious discussion on how to migrate off rehash would have be worked out, although this doesn't need to be set in stone to stop dissolution.

I don't know if this will actually come through, and I don't want to build hope if there isn't any, but I would prefer an option that allows SN to continue.

I'm reading the comments, and here's my initial thoughts, I'll mull more as feedback comes i.:

Folks want AC posting to stay.

I'm personally not a fan, but frankly, I am willing to concede this point. It may become "Logged in users can post as AC" if you have high karma, or leave it as it is that ACs can post on journals, but not on the main page, but that's a more in-depth discussion. I may actually wait until after the site renovations are complete before addressing this; that means the backend has been updated to use less brittle infrastructure.

For now, the current status quo will continue, but I will continue to get feedback on what the final for of this will take. I may also just leave it for whomever replaces me, as I do wish to find someone to replace me.

Karma changes

I don't think I saw much objection to this. I wrote some comments explaining how karma works, but the short version is its a range from -25 to 50, with +3 points given when you submit a story, and then affected by moderation values. By and large, people don't downvote very often, especially on logged in accounts. This was a constant problem which is why we ended up going with 10 moderator points per day vs. the original lottery system. Shrinking the range might be enough to basically cause AC posts to automatically get tagged as -1 if there's just a stream of garbage coming out of the domain. That might be enough of a middle ground here.

Comment Deletion/Edit

My intent here was that for things like COVID misinformation and the like, it should be flat out deleted ala a subreddit. I wasn't clear about this in the original post however. I'll talk with the editors more about that on the side. As for an edit button, I'm not object to it, but it would be a time limited thing, and keep the original post and show a banner "This post was edited"

  - N

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.

This week has been a dumpster fire, but I'll write more up about SN tomorrow, and more plans going forward. I'll try and draft things tonight on where we're going. Just wanted to post publicly that I am still working on things in the background.

About 18 months after he lost the 2020 election, Election Conspiracist in Chief Donald Trump sued Hillary Clinton and dozens of other Democrats over the election he had won nearly six years earlier.

That lawsuit went nowhere. But going nowhere meant tying up a lot of the court’s time, what with Trump’s lawyers dumping 193-page complaints onto the docket and targeting more than 30 defendants with a bizarre set of allegations claiming the election, that Trump won, had been rigged. That such an alleged rigging would result in Trump’s victory suggests either the defendants secretly wanted Trump to win or, more logically, that the plaintiff was full of shit.

The district court ruled against Trump roughly six months after the lawsuit was filed, finding that it was not only not the RICO (yes, that was in there too), but it wasn’t anything else either, no matter how many words Trump’s lawyers had tossed together in exceedingly long legal filings.

The lawyers representing Trump in this ridiculous waste of publicly funded time are now being hit with sanctions by the court that had the misfortune of handling this lawsuit. They will join a long list of other lawyers currently or formerly employed by the former president who have been fined or sued for engaging in baseless lawsuits over election results.

The sanction order [PDF] helpfully lists the offending legal professionals right up front, allowing readers to avoid accidentally seeking representation from this group of lawyers who decided to shed their respectability to engage in extremely performative litigation.

Defendant Charles Dolan has moved for sanctions pursuant to Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Upon review of the motion (DE 268), Plaintiff’s response (DE 270) and Defendant’s reply (DE 276), and for the reasons explained below, the motion is granted. Accordingly, sanctions shall be awarded jointly and severally against Alina Habba, Michael T. Madaio, Habba Madaio & Associates, Peter Ticktin, Jamie Alan Sasson, and The Ticktin Law Group.

That’s who is getting sanctioned. Here’s why: mainly it’s all the lying.

The pleadings in this case contained factual allegations that were either knowingly false or made in reckless disregard for the truth. The following examples are indicative.

When suing someone it helps to know where they live, as this can have subject matter or personal jurisdiction significance. In this case for instance, Mr. Dolan argued that he engaged in no activities in Florida that made him susceptible to suit here. He filed an affidavit stating under oath that he lived in Virginia. His lawyers advised Mr. Trump’s lawyers of that. Moreover, the summons in this case indicated an Arlington, Virginia address and the return of service indicated he was served there. Yet the Amended Complaint alleged that Mr. Dolan was a resident of New York. The Trump lawyers’ answer:

[I]t must be noted that Charles Dolan is an incredibly common name, and Plaintiff’s counsel’s traditional search methods identified countless individuals with said name across the country, many of whom reside in New York.

While alone not of great significance, this response reflects the cavalier attitude towards facts demonstrated throughout the case.

Just one of many problems with the allegations. Those are things in court cases that are supposed to be factual. These weren’t. Trump’s legal reps couldn’t seem to decide whether Dolan was the head of the Democratic National Committee, a senior Clinton Campaign official, or just someone who happened to be in the racketeering business of keeping Trump out of office. The lawsuit cherry-picked information from a government indictment in an attempt to portray Dolan’s statements to investigators as deliberate lies deployed to further a conspiracy against Trump. None of this was true and pretty much everything alleged was either provably false or entirely inaccurate.

The court sums it up this way:

In short, I find that Mr. Trump’s lawyers were warned about the lack of foundation for their factual contentions, turned a blind eye towards information in their possession, and misrepresented the Danchenko Indictment they claim as their primary support. The lawyers failed to conduct a pre-filing inquiry into the allegations against Mr. Dolan and have continued to advance Plaintiff’s false claims based upon nothing but conjecture, speculation, and guesswork. This is precisely the conduct Rule 11 is intended to deter.

[It continues....]

upstart writes:

The Gig Law Causing Chaos in California Strip Clubs:

Teddy earned what she considers good money as a self-employed dancer working in California's strip clubs. Yes, there were slow nights when wages slumped, says Teddy, who asks to use a pseudonym because not everyone in her life knows she is a sex worker. But the slow nights balanced out with evenings when the club was crammed full of customers. She says on average she never took home less than California's minimum wage (currently $15 per hour).

Teddy now refers to this period as the "era before AB 5"—a California state law officially called Assembly Bill 5, which aimed to reclassify self-employed workers as employees. Under this law, more workers are entitled to benefits such as overtime and minimum wage. The law's supporters, such as US Senator Elizabeth Warren, described the law as an answer to exploitation in the gig economy. But a controversial 2020 public vote meant the rules have not yet been applied to companies such as Uber and Lyft. Instead AB 5 reshaped a raft of other industries, from yoga studios to theater productions and trucking.

The debate about AB 5's impact on industries beyond the gig economy is in the spotlight again, as the Biden administration explores a new federal law to protect workers from misclassification. Although the US House of Representatives passed a federal version of AB 5—called the "Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act"—back in March 2021, it has since stalled in the Senate. Last week, the Department of Labor proposed a new law designed to turn more self-employed Americans into employees entitled to the minimum wage.

"The Department of Labor's proposal does not go nearly as far as AB 5," says Keith Cunningham-Parmeter, a law professor at Willamette University in Oregon who studies the impact of gig work regulation on offline workers. "AB 5 created a presumption that most workers hired by firms were employees," he says, while the Department of Labor's new rule effectively creates a test to be used in court to understand if a  worker should be considered an employee by considering a series of factors, including how much control they have over their earnings and the way they do their jobs.

Yet the unintended impact that AB 5 is having on strip clubs serves as a warning to policymakers who focus too much on misclassification in the gig economy. Since AB 5, that trade has experienced some of the most dramatic changes in the state. Dancers are divided about whether they want to become employees. But there is a growing consensus that strip clubs' interpretation of the law has resulted in dancers' pay being slashed and their jobs becoming more precarious. Although there are similarities between dancers and gig workers, dancers also believe there are important differences that mean they deserve tailored legislation. They say they do not want to be regulated like gig workers.

"AB 5 has been implemented in an absolutely horrific way throughout clubs in California, in ways that pushed a lot of people out of the industry and made it a way less lucrative and way less viable job than it was before," says Teddy, who is now a member of the activist group Strippers United. "AB 5 was meant to protect gig workers and it just happened to catch dancers in a technicality."

[...] Workers and researchers warn the gig economy is warping the debate about employee status, meaning that the problems faced by independent contractors in different industries are being lumped together. "Everyone talks about these bills as gig worker bills. But when you look at them, they apply to workers across industries, digital and analog," says Cunningham-Parmeter. "Even today, in 2022, the vast majority of low wage workers are not gig workers."

Other industries are divided about whether AB 5 had a positive impact on self-employed workers. Writers and typists are among those who have campaigned to repeal the law, claiming it hurts their ability to find work. "Due to California law AB 5, SpeakWrite cannot accept applications from California residents," says one job advert posted by transcription service SpeakWrite. Truckers have also complained about AB 5's changes. In July 2022, a convoy of truckers blockaded the port Port of Oakland to protest AB 5, arguing their new status as employees meant they have less flexibility in when and how they work.

Before AB 5, California employment officials estimated that companies misclassified up to 500,000 workers as independent contractors, says Cunningham-Parmeter. He believes the introduction of minimum wage and overtime protection was a positive development for the vast majority, even if  some companies abuse the spirit of the new law.

"Studies indicate that companies can save up to 30 percent of payroll and labor costs by misclassifying their workers as independent contractors," he says. "Therefore, it should come as no surprise that when some businesses, like strip clubs, were forced to finally treat their workers as employees, many such firms passed those new costs on to workers in the form of reduced wages or hours."