I just discovered a possible vulnerability in a WordPress plugin that supports OpenID authentication for comments. The developer’s website is down and the plugin hasn’t been updated in two years.

What’s protocol for this these days? I’ve trivially patched my own install, but (particularly pending further analysis which I have not done – for all I know it’s not actually exploitable… but I kind of think it is) I strongly recommend disabling this plugin unless you have your own patch.

There’s an amusing exchange going on over at File 770 right now, between Puppies and one of the people who demanded to be removed from their slate.

What Juliette Wade said about being put on the Sad Puppies slate (more at the link):

[Juliette]: Brad, I am sorry, but if you will be labeling me as a sad puppy I will have to ask you to withdraw me from your list.

Brad [Torgersen]: You’ve not been labeled a sad puppy. This is the :fight puppy-related sadness list” I contacted you about earlier. You said you were OK with it.

[Juliette]: You did not say you were going to be calling it the Sad Puppies list. I feel like you were misrepresenting it. I’m happy to be one of your Hugo recommendations. This is different.

What Brad Torgersen decided that meant (again, more at the link):

Juliette’s a colleague at Analog and I’ve been hoping for three years to see her name finally appear on the Hugo ballot. It’s unfortunate that Juliette’s fears — at being shamed, shunned, and ostracized, for appearing on the “wrong” list — caused her to withdraw when the slate was released. Which says far, far more about Sad Puppies’ detractors, than it does about Juliette, or me for that matter.

Once again, the Are your papers in order? factor rears its ugly head.

What Juliette had to say about that (yet more at the link):

Brad Torgersen, you are pretty brazen, trying to speak for me, and I would appreciate it if you never attempted to do so again. I was entirely unaware of the Sad Puppy connection because I had deliberately been avoiding looking at your wall, much less your blog, for going on two years. My maintenance of our friendship was out of courtesy. I guess I was too idealistic, thinking that Sad Puppies might be over and that you would just be talking to me about some Hugo recommendations, but I do like to think the best of people. It should not be my responsibility to go and look up whether a person is being dishonest every time they say they like my work. Just to be clear, you have clearly got no idea of my motivations and are trying to spin them to your benefit. I was appalled by your actions in the Sad Puppy business last year and obviously made a mistake in thinking that you should be taken at your word (with the understanding that people include all relevant and important information when they are informing someone of something, which you did not do in this case.) I would never, ever have wanted to associate with Sad Puppies after last year, because of the depth of my anger over their behavior. I felt sick that you had deceived me and betrayed my confidence, and the fact that you denied having done so is irrelevant. You, and your actions, were what I was avoiding in pulling myself off the list.

What oberpuppyführer Vox Day had to say in response (you get the idea):

You SJWs really are remarkable. Brad does nothing but attempt to tell you the exact truth and you respond by twisting and contorting every word to try to paint him as the sort of liar that you all are.

I will leave it up to you to compare Brad’s and Juliette’s statements about what Juliette herself said, and figure out exactly how “exact truth” applies to Brad’s commentary. Extra credit for staying within the bounds of rationality.

eta: Wow, check out this creepiness in another, newer comment. Damn.

This is part of a collection of posts on both the Hugo Award/Sad Puppies matter and other related topics in geek culture. The master post lives here.

You know you’ve been running a festival too long when you find you’re reflexively doing crowd-counts at somebody’s wedding.

It probably didn’t help that they had The Heather Dale Band in for the show nuptials, but still. XD

(Hi Ben! Hi Heather! And congratulations to Naomi and Glenn!)

For some reason, I really, really want to hear Daredevil‘s Wilson Fisk angrily singing “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah.”

The propellentless electric drive may actually work, says latest NASA test. That’s super cool. Seriously, I am crazy excited about that. I’m still holding off on going WOOHOO MOON EXPRESS because this is very much in that category of “extraordinary claims” and “extraordinary evidence,” but wow, it would be amazing. Seriously, with existing conventional submarine reactor power sources, we’re talking four hours TO THE MOON.

NO REALLY, FOUR HOURS TO THE MOON. And Alpha Centauri in less than a century. We’re talking about comprehensible time here, where shit starts getting real.

We’re still a long way from that. Don’t get hopes up too high; this could still all be noise or who knows what. And it probably is. But it might not be, so: exciting.

I am not so excited that space.com listed all the men in the UK and US who had worked on various reproduction tests of the drive, but anonymised the work of Processor Juan Yang and her research team’s critical work confirmation reproduction efforts in China.

Fortunately, not all stories were so scrubby with that eraser, which is how I know her name. Still – goddamn, space.com, mentioning everyone but her?

But then, given that journals will occasionally slip and just tell women scientists outright that if they want to get their work published they should add some men to the author list (and, incidentally, that men are “better” paper writers because “[m]ale doctoral students can probably run a mile race a bit faster than female doctoral students,” and yes, that is a quote), I guess I have to ask, what the fuck do I expect?

John Ringo wrote up a hilariously strawariffic post called “Understanding SJW logic and why it is destroying science fiction,” which James Nicoll linked to from his Livejournal. Mr. Ringo’s post got a lot of comments and… apparently got too embarrassing? So he deleted it. Or maybe it was an accident, who knows?

But either way, don’t worry, John, Google has your back. Or, if you’d prefer, there are always PDF archives, and here’s a big PNG.

And here’s the first page! Enjoy.

I’ll also update the previous deletions post with this, because yeah.

eta: John Scalzi responds to John Ringo’s deleted post.

I used to take a lot of flower pictures. No, really, lots. I haven’t as much lately, but still do once in a while. Sakura season is over, but have a recent memory of it:

John Scalzi has posted that Edmund Schubert, editor of Intergalactic Medicine Show, has pulled his name from Hugo consideration in response to the Puppies slates – most particularly, the Rabid Puppies version.

I have one thing I must, again, call out. Mr. Schubert predictably defends Orson Scott Card against the various people who have boycotted Mr. Card’s works on the basis of Mr. Card’s political activities, saying:

…when the Puppies say they feel shut out because of their politics, it’s hard for me to not empathize because I’ve seen IGMS’s authors chastised for selling their story to us, simply because of people’s perceptions about the publisher’s personal views. I’ve also seen people refuse to read any of the stories published in IGMS for the same reason. … The truth is that Card is neither devil nor saint; he’s just a man who wants to support writers and artists—and he doesn’t let anything stand in the way of that.

A man who wants to support writers and artists, and, incidentally, have a history of saying that queers should be illegal, and was still only a few short years ago actively working as a board member of a national organisation founded to fight LGBT equality.

Yeah, sure, he’s given up. He’s quit, he’s admitted he’s lost the fight. Not that he’s sorry, mind you; just that he’s lost. Regardless, people who defend Mr. Card keep eliding over that whole history, like it’s some sort of no-big-deal look-how-silly he was. Like personal politics shouldn’t matter at all, even when those personal politics involve making people like me illegal.

Edmund Schubert says he’s published queer authors in Intergalactic Medicine Show, and will continue to do so, and he says that’s with the full support of Mr. Card. Also stories by and of women, and various racial groups and religions. That’s good.

But I’ve got an assortment of assaults and a hospital visit and more money than I want to think about and years of lost time and decades of living in various degrees of fear all spent fighting for my legal and occasionally physical life against Mr. Card’s allies, and, to a lesser degree, Mr. Card himself. He and his friends on the social right have quite literally cost me and millions like me untold amounts of both blood and treasure.

And his erstwhile allies still are, across the globe, American fundamentalists exporting their religion of hate, getting execution laws passed, spreading the same lies they weren’t able to sell at home any longer.

So don’t expect that to stop mattering to me. And never, ever, dare tell me that it shouldn’t matter. Because, maybe, for you, it doesn’t have to. But to me? That’s quite a luxury. One I will never have.

eta: Hugo Award voting has commenced. I recommend voting for NO AWARD over any slated candidate this year, and voting for any and all candidates you think worthy above that line. I maintain that it is the only way we have of preventing being overrun by slates every year until and unless rules changes are made.

eta2: Rather belatedly, hello again, File 770 readers! Despite all the Hugo Award political slate posts as of late, I’m mostly a geek musician; you can play our new album with the gadget in the upper left, or pick tracks on Bandcamp. Welcome!

Hey, Apache, thanks for making 2.4 configs massively incompatible with 2.2 config files! Thanks for that! That’s so awesome. #fuckeverything

We’re about 95% back up. Let a minion know if something explodes.

The blog is very unhappy at the moment. As is the webserver, really. Hi, it’s 3am cascadian time and dist-upgrade was NOT our friend today. Not even a little. We’re working on it.