Account security and important notes

[mark]

Over the past few days, Dreamwidth has come under attack by a group of trolls with ties to several hate speech organizations. These people are attempting to disrupt our business through a number of methods unless we acquiesce to their demands. Unfortunately they are threatening and harassing not only us, but many of our volunteers and contributors as well.

The chief methods being used at the moment are false accusations to our merchant processor and our upstream provider that we host child pornography. We do not. Our Terms of Service prohibits all illegal material, and any reports of such material can be made to our Terms of Service team. They've also threatened to highlight legally protected speech in an attempt to stir up a moral panic against our business. We are working with our upstream providers to make sure they're aware of these allegations as well.

As part of this organized campaign of harassment, there have been instances reported to us of phishing attempts: setting up sites that look like Dreamwidth in order to obtain users' passwords. To protect yourselves, please make absolutely certain that you are only logging in at https://www.dreamwidth.org by typing the address into your browser's bar directly. Do not log in via any link sent to you in email, no matter how much it looks like it might come from Dreamwidth.

We have been, and will continue to, do everything we can to ensure steady and uninterrupted service throughout the current situation, but please bear with us if we experience any rocky periods. If anything happens, we will update our @dreamwidth Twitter account with status information as soon as possible.

We want you guys to know that we're incredibly thankful for our community, contributors, and everyone who takes the time to create with us. We'll be doing everything we can to make sure you guys can keep building the kind of community that makes all of this worth it.

Comments

[ordinarygirl]

God, I can't believe some people. -_-

On the bright side, I am so very glad that I have signed up with you guys, as I know you will handle this professionally and morally, without any of the fear or unreasonableness or witch hunting that LiveJournal perpetrated.

You have my support in whatever way I can provide it. :)

[denise]

Thanks -- we're on it, and I think the best thing to do right now would be to make a donation to an organization like Doctors Without Borders or some other group that's working to provide earthquake relief in Haiti, in order to increase the positive karma in the world.

[seticat]

Thank you for the heads up on this. The nastiness of some folks still amazes me.

[glitch]

Oh, wow... That sounds like a mess. I hope it all turns out well -- and quickly.

[catecumen.myopenid.com]

You have my support too, and like ordinarygirl, I would like to do what I can to help.

[xaea]

Wow. That is so incredibly lame.

You have my 100% support. I promise I won't even complain if service temporarily goes down because of all of this.

You guys ROCK. ♥

[lynnenne]

Is it http://www.dreamwidth.org, or https://www.dreamwidth.org?

[archangelbeth]

http://www.dreamwidth.org/ gets me to a good page.

[karayan]

Thanks for letting us know. It sucks that you guys have to go through this, but on the bright side, if you're attracting ire from the sort of people who'd do this kind of thing, you must be doing something right. (Small comfort, but optimism never hurts!)

[archangelbeth]

Is there any way that users could help? Testimonies to lack of your moral degeneratude? (...that is so not a word.)

[merlinpendragon]

I think what you were reaching for was the phrase "testimonies to your lack of moral turpitude" - but that's just a guess.

[calanor]

Some people have too much time on their hands...

Do you need someone to bring in a load of Tums??? Or Mylanta???

[shanaqui]

I trust you guys to handle this and handle it well. As a gesture of my support, I'm renewing the paid accounts I have here. ♥

[ilyena_sylph]

What about logging in via your own journal's signed-out version?

Is that safe?

Sorry, but I never come to the main page.

[highlyeccentric]

That's my personal tactic - I'm no security whiz, but it seems like the safest option to me.

[dragonfly]

Please let us know if there's any way we can help.

[baconface]

BANANAS. B-A-N-A-N-A-S.

You have my boundless love and support. I should send you guys late holiday cards or something, you amazing human beings, you.

(frozen comment)

[redwolf]

Kudos for standing up to the scum.

When these idiots hit LJ, they attacked heaps of innocent parties (which the morons at LJ shutdown without checking) and not only completely ignored the paedophiles, but their actions drove the real paedophiles further underground making it harder to law enforcement to deal with them.

These people are foaming vigilantes. They are not affiliated with any law enforcement agency and have a history of hindering law enforcement activity with their stupidity. They have no training and firmly believe that if you disagree with them, then you must be a paedophile.

The only way to handle with these idiots is to get as much information as possible on them and forward it to the police and FBI. Publicly embarrassing them certainly wouldn't go astray either.

(frozen comment)

[azurelunatic]

You, um, are aware that denise was employed at LJ during May/June 2007, right? Though I have every faith that a number of the horrible decisions were indeed made by a genuine blithering idiot (and that D was a bastion of sanity&reason throughout).

("the morons at LJ" is just a bit of a broad brush, perhaps unintentionally so.)

[helens78]

Blech! Let us know if there's anything we-the-userbase can do; thanks for keeping us posted!

[silmaril]

Exactly, this. I'll go check if it's time for me to renew yet.

[elizaria]

Well that sucks. And what ordinarygirl and redwolf said.

[archersangel]

there are no words for people like that

[auntbijou]

Thanks for being the completely awesome folks that you are, and not dancing to the tune of the trolls like LJ did. We'll hold tight with you!

[ladyqkat]

I think the fact that denise worked at LJ during the attack over there made her cognizant of the tactics being used. Once burned, twice shy.

[amadi]

How about naming names? Who are these troll and haters?

[zvi]

It's actually not a good idea to name the names in this sort of attack. The people doing it are in part doing it for lolz and notoriety, so the less you talk about it and the less specific you are about it, the less they get out of it.

[inalasahl]

Thank you for letting us know.

[ai]

Thank you for giving us a heads up about this. If you have a testimonials page set up or anything where users can submit their opinion of the site, I would love to have the link. Even if it's offsite :)

I dub this Stupid People Week

[jumpuphigh]

I ditto many of the comments above. Tell us what to do. We are powerful.

Re: I dub this Stupid People Week

[dorkpie]

I think I saw this said at 4chan sometime during the Dusty the cat incident ._.

[mommy]

Thank you for letting your userbase know about this. I hope you can get this resolved quickly and without too many headaches.

[geminianeyes]

Ditto this. Thanks, Dreamwidth.

[nikolasco]

Even better than typing the URL is using a bookmark. The overwhelming majority of mis-typed versions of "dreamwidth.org" are available for registration and could be used for phishing.

[isaacsapphire]

Perhaps in the future buying up these URLs and making them redirect to the main site would be a good idea, assuming the cost is reasonable.

[aquaeri]

Part of the reason I switched to DW was that I knew you guys weren't just going to start banning users willy-nilly when this kind of shit hit. Thank you for staying true to DW.

And if you need Pan-Galactic Gargle Blasters to destress afterwards, I'd be happy to send a virtual one your way.

[baggyeyes]

I just love the fact you suggested a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster.