Fuck Twitter (Pt. 2)

 Previously, I said, "fuck Twitter". Today, I found that I'd been temp-banned, again. Apparently, saying that someone should face the long-established legal repercussions of treasonous acts:

Is somehow in violation of Twitter's policies. Apparently, the above violates the policy of "You may not engage in the targeted harassment of someone, or incite other people to do so." I don't see it. I'm simply stating that Trump should face established legal consequences of his actions if those actions can be proven.

Fun fact: when you request an appeal, they offer you the option to explain why your penalty should be overturned. However, they limit your explanatory text to not even half as many characters as one is afforded for a tweet. Seems pretty obvious that both Twitter's sanction and appeal processes are a sham.

I guess that, after this (7-day) ban ends, I am going to export my posting-history and delete my account.

It's Technological Annoyances Day

Every month, I archive my personal and work emails to a separate gMail account. It helps keep my actively-monitored mailboxes manageable and provides me a good backup of old mails, "just in case". Normally, I just go into my IMAP mail-client (Thunderbird), do a search for all of the prior month's emails, select all the returns, then use my mail client's message-move feature to kick off the archival process. Normally, it's fire and forget and, depending how much mail I've sent or received in a month, it takes a few minutes to as much as an hour. Today, however, Google keeps timing out on the transfers, as though they've implemented some kind of throttling. WTF, guys. I paid for the extra storage, stop fucking messing with me.

Fuck Twitter

 So, this morning, I log in at 0600 to start my work day. As I'm waiting for the tunnels to my work-environment to set up, I hop on Twitter real quick to see if there were any overnight notifications waiting. Instead, I find:

 So, I follow the on-screen prompts to see what the fuck was the reason, this time. I find that someone had apparently reported me for the post:

I was, to say the least, incredulous. My response was to the post:

When I discovered my issue at 0600-ish, it said I had a bit over six hours left on a 12 hour ban. It asked if I wanted to appeal the temp-ban. So, I clicked on the links to do so. A little while later, I get an email saying "nope: the ban stands". It arrived ridiculously fast. Like, so fast that I have sincere doubts that such "appeals" are actually handled by humans, or, if they are even glanced at by humans, it's only in the most-cursory manner possible (likely some paid-by-the-article-reviewed wage-slave that doesn't actually bother to read the appealed-content).

I mean, the Trumps collectively post far worse on a daily basis. So to do their followers. Even after the ban of DJT and others in his hateful, pin-headed cabal, his followers continue to re-share his horrendous shit as images taken from postings on other sites.

Hell, it took DJT fanning the flames of an insurrection to get perma-banned and had taken significantly more than a joking-fantasy post to get his posts labeled with a moderation-notice (though, interestingly not actually banned).

However, if I make an obvious joke, I get hit with the (temp) ban-hammer? I mean, seriously: when am I going to have the "opportunity" to interact with any Trump, let alone this, specific shit-weasel. Even if I did get a chance to make such an offer, how likely is it that said shit-weasel would accept it – yes, I know the fucktard in question has demonstrably-poor taste in food, but even he's gotta have high enough mental-functionality to turn down a meal at a shady restaurant even if he were otherwise predisposed to accept an offer.

So, again, how is this ban-worthy at all let alone compared to the things they've posted. My post was significantly tamer than other shit, even if one is so clue-impaired as to not see the obvious joke. I get that my miniscule number of followers means I get no special consideration, but still… combined with their years of failure to meaningfully moderate, it really makes one wonder what the fuck kind of sliding-scale it is they're using.

At any rate, with the temp-ban in place and the clock counting down, I was able to at least read posts. However, given that my VPN-tunnels had finally completed their setup and I had a busy work day to attend to, I flipped away to my work virtual-desktop and attended to my work.

I finished up my work-day a bit after 1500. Went to check on my ban-status, fully expecting that, since I'd worked for 9+ hours, the ban would be over. Instead I found my Twitter tab had refreshed itself to:

And I was no longer even able to read posts. Clicking on the Start button, instead of getting me back to the reader, simply bounced me back to the above status page with a slightly decremented counter.

Also, it appears that having filed an appeal at 0600ish caused my temp-ban's timer to be reset.

So, again, "Fuck. Twitter."

You Call This Managing a Project?

 You're in charge of a decent-sized, multi-year project. You've been using a hosted ticketing- and documentation-service to manage the work and documentation for that work. Eighteen months ago, you received notice that the hoster is discontinuing their offering and that you need to be off their service by 2022-08-01 (when it goes into a read-only mode for thirty days before finally being offlined). Do you immediately start planning your move …or do you wait till July of 2022 to start trying to move everyone off?

I think you know where I'm going with this, but, "wait: there's more!"

Middle of last week, project's management-team sent out a request asking us to test their IP whitelisting solution. They had selected a new hosted ticketing- and documentation-system. However for security reasons, they didn't want it to be attackable from random people on the internet. Therefore, to access their new, hosted service, they needed to whitelist everybody. Obviously, whitelisting a primarily-remote workforce of several dozen people would be an unwieldy IP-list to maintain – especially when someone's IP changed due to, say, a power outage. So, they decided to whitelist the IP address of a bastion-host we'd set up for SSH-based tunneling into their networks. However, they didn't understand that our already whitelisted host was strictly for SSH tunneling and not a full-fledged VPN solution. They'd been told that in 2019 but never really bothered to understand the difference. This meant that they didn't understand why it wasn't really meant to be an HTTP proxy. Yes, we tunnel HTTP through it, but the whitelisted host is the first passthrough-hop in a multi-hop tunnel. The proxied HTTP content was all hosted in network-space that was topologically part of the same network-space that the egress-node of the multi-hop SSH-tunnel was in. Setting up the first-hop tunnel-host as a direct HTTP proxy would mean needing to set up a tunneled-proxy on that first-hop host …and a corresponding new browser session so it could be configured to use that new proxy-endpoint. All for for one URL.

Yesterday, they got one of the networks we tunnel to whitelisted. However, only sometimes does the login URL respond before timing out. And, when it does, the login service doesn't reliably recognize our 2FA tokens (and thus far, when I've actually been able to connect, has never recognized my token).

I reported these problems as I encountered them, but their response has been utter nonchalance, even when I reminded them "your current ticketing system dies at 0000 Monday".