End of the road for LiveJournal
I've got some very bad news about LiveJournal. Please feel free to link to this post or otherwise spread the information, but I'd appreciate it if you don't mention my real name.
There have been rumors about LiveJournal servers moving to Russia. Most of the solid information seems to be on Russian-language sites, which I can't read. However, we have geolocation as a tool to confirm or dispel rumors. IPLocation.net lets you enter a domain or IP address and get information from several sources about its likely geographic location. This information isn't precise; sometimes it's actually the location of the upstream server, and it isn't too hard to falsify. My own geolocation jumps over several states, even though I'm sitting at home.
In general, it's a pretty reliable tool for big websites. Unfortunately, it doesn't have any obvious way to make a site part of the URL, so you have to go to the site and enter a domain yourself.
A couple of days ago, I checked www.livejournal.com and felt reassured when the result said it was in San Francisco. This morning, though, I checked madfilkentist.livejournal.com. All sources say "Moscow."
My own LJ is now hosted in Moscow.
news.livejournal.com is also in Moscow. That helps explained why we weren't told when the parent company's parent company's ... OK, I've already used that joke.
I then checked on the LJ domains of a few friends of mine. All Moscow.
This means that we can no longer regard our accounts as safe or restricted posts as private. I don't think any of us in the USA, Canada, UK, or Germany are in danger of anything more than losing our accounts, though, unless we do something unusually attention-grabbing. LJ already has a history of terminating accounts for made-up reasons; this can only increase the risk.
I'm moving all personal posting to Dreamwidth, effective right after this post. I'll keep this account but make sure I never do anything of value for LiveJournal (such as renewing my paid account). I may use it to tweak the Russian rulers; if LJ terminates my account for that, I'll consider it a great honor. See you on Dreamwidth!