The Florida House of Representatives approved a bill to ban social media for kids under the age of 16. What is it with that hive of scum and villainy? There is zero chance, none, nil, that Free Radical will ask visitors to verify their age in a way that would require us to collect personal information. We’ll ignore goofy, unconstitutional laws from other states. If a jurisdiction I care about requires us to collect PII, I’ll move FRZ to somewhere more reasonable.

The UK just passed a stupid Online Safety Bill. As a point of fact, Free Radical is not subject to the UK’s laws. As a point of policy, I couldn’t care less about their goofy regulations. It might as well not exist as far as I’m concerned. In summary, Free Radical has no obligation to, and will not, enforce any bit of the Online Safety Bill (except where it coincidentally aligns with United States and California law).

I previously said that the Russians are coming. Yes, I meant it. In the last two weeks, I’ve had registrations from 25 accounts that flagged themselves as bots. Of those, about half went on to post exactly one spammy toot. Of these, 24 of them had email addresses that were hosted by mxsrv.mailasrvs.pw. That one server itself is hosted by DigitalOcean, an American hosting company. The other email address is from a domain without a designated mailserver (that is, it lacks an MX record).

This updates my last blog post where I said that we’re getting a flood of spambots. Summary: if you’re an admin affected by this, you must act now. I’ll cut to the chase. It seems that this week’s collection of spammer registrations come from Russia. I think that the spam they’re sending today is a probe to see who will respond to it. My prediction is that instances who don’t act quickly will see those accounts stop posting and drawing attention to themselves.

FOSTA – the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act of 2017 – and SESTA – the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act of 2017 are some likely unconstitutional, certainly unnecessary jackassery. While I agree with the EFF that this is terrible law, I don’t think it’s the end of the world. FOSTA says: (Sec. 2) This bill expresses the sense of Congress that section 230 of the Communications Act of 1934 was not intended to provide legal protection to websites that unlawfully promote and facilitate prostitution and websites that facilitate traffickers in advertising the sale of unlawful sex acts with sex trafficking victims.