rm | Frienditto

From several of my friends -- all of this is via them, as I've had NO DIRECT CONTACT WITH THE SITE, but feel this meritted enough concern to repost here:

Watch out for Frienditto.

This site is an archive service that claims affiliation with Live Journal BUT DOES NOT HAVE IT.

There has been some concern over this site and security of LJ accounts. If you provide it with your login information for your Live Journal you give this service permission to archive your friends only entries and ANY locked entries of your friends for which you have access.

Please read the following answer to my support request regarding this site and be informed. More importantly, inform others.

Dear user,

Frienditto is not affiliated with LiveJournal in any way. As such, this website does not have access to any entries which are not publicly viewable. If someone provides them with their LiveJournal username and password, however, it gives this site access to all non-public entries that account would have access to. We can only recommend that you do not provide your username and password to any person or website to ensure the security of your account.

Additionally, if you believe anyone on your Friends list may have provided their login information to this website, we can only advise that you remove them from your Friends list. This website will have access to your Friends-only entries as long as any person on your Friends list has given the site access. If any content is present on Frienditto which you do not wish to be there, you will need to resolve the issue with that website.

Regards,

Scott
LiveJournal Abuse Team

(Emphasis mine)

If you are using this site I will remove you from my friends list. Additionally, I will be extraordinarily cross at you, either for being an idiot, or a malicious little freak.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

magicmitsuki.livejournal.com

You don't have to provide your username and password to save public entries to frienditto.

Anyone who wants to make their private post public can simply unlock it, or post it again, publicly.

Anyone wishing to be malicious can simply copy and paste the private entry into their own journal.

Anyone who is an asshole enough to frienditto a private post which is not their own... deserves whatever problems they get from doing it.

So... what's the big deal?

It's not Frienditto's fault, the REAL SOLUTION IS:

Pay attention and becareful of what individual people you add onto your f-list

Any and all problems are your own fault, not friendittos.

From: (Anonymous)

The big deal, seems to me, is that while yes, anything you put on the internet isn't REALLY private, and yes, friends with access to flocked posts can easily do any number of other things that they do to blab their mouth about things that their friends TRUSTED they would keep between them...

But with all the other 'methods' of capturing a flocked entry, you still had to have some way to identify yourself, be it in where you host it etc...and it was harder to hide your identity that you were the sleazefucker that betrayed someone's trust.

Now, friendittos takes away all that and makes it easy as pie to betray trust that is bestowed.

Options? Environment of distrust. Don't flock anything. If you have something you need to vent, keep it offline. And now...everyone will be looking over their shoulder at people they previously trusted (as much as one can trust on the internet) and wonder who it was that decided their business should be made known to others.

*shrug* It's a shame. Will we go now from an easy going community spirit of friends, acquaintences and people who got along to now mistrust of everyone you come across.

Not the healthy mistrust that everyone should invoke but the paranoid mistrust that everyone is going to tell your private business out to the rest of your flist.

Small potatos in the grand scheme of things but this air of encouraging betrayal with no consequences that affect the betrayer (after all, it's anonymous, right?)...the betrayer has nothing to lose, while those they betray, have everything to lose.

From:

dancingdrew.livejournal.com

Or you could not be a moron and just NOT add people you don't trust in the first place. I have as many people on LJ who don't like me as anyone--and more than most--and yet my friends-locked entries are entirely safe. (Oh, and by the way, people on my friends list HAVE used their passwords and yet STILL my journal is safe.)

I can't believe the retarded reactions people are having. For one, NO ONE CARES ABOUT YOUR GODDAMN FRIENDS-ONLY ENTRIES. GOD. What is up with every LiveJournal user thinking that the maintainers of Frienditto are deeply interested in their lives? Two, OH MY GOD INTERNET TRUST IS BROKEN for Chrissake, it's the internet. You shouldn't have put anything up here you're unwilling for the world to know regardless. Frienditto threw that into sharper relief, but Frienditto didn't make you add trolls out to hurt your feelings. Frienditto didn't force you to make attention-whorish private posts.

From: (Anonymous)

You are right. FRIENDITTO isn't interested in perpetuating the wank.

But please. We'll see if the trust you have in the few select friends you have on your FO posts will bear out.

People get pissy. People get their feelings hurt. People get it in their head that even after years of friendship, they decide that something said in the privacy of a flocked post and posts it all over hell and creation.

The issue isn't having a FO list of 300 and having your FO entries violated.

The issue is for those tightly filtered FO posts.

You can't ever really know if you have someone you thought you could trust, violate that trust until you find your business plastered all over the internet.

Let me repeat. It's not about Frienditto except they make the archiving of FO posts (most likely done if a fit of pique) and they are done ANONYMOUSLY. So you won't ever really know which person you THOUGHT you could trust, can't be trusted anymore. So screening out the morons doesn't help much, does it?

FRIENDITTO is simply helping to foster the air of mistrust among friends. It is helping to enable that mistrust. And it is making it easy to do so and not have the archiver held responsible for breaking trust.

Can you HONESTLY say that those that you FO to are 100% trustworthy? Can you HONESTLY hold to that 100% of the time for now in to perpetuity? Can you HONESTLY say that one of those you hold in trust today will still be trustworthy tomorrow?

The internet tends to make people fucktards. The moment anonymity enters in to the picture, people can and usually do turn out to be cockbites.

THAT is the issue. FRIENDITTO allows for anonymity.

And being affiliated with LJDrama who has such a stellar record for drama and wank? Sorry. Not a ringing endorsement in my mind.

From:

dancingdrew.livejournal.com

We'll see if the trust you have in the few select friends you have on your FO posts will bear out.

Actually, we already have. If someone on my friends list was interested in violating my trust, they already would have.

The issue is for those tightly filtered FO posts.

Which makes you even MORE foolish.

It's not about Frienditto except they make the archiving of FO posts (most likely done if a fit of pique) and they are done ANONYMOUSLY.

Something easily done before frienditto. Save HTML, remove personally identifying portions, post to free webspace.

Can you HONESTLY say that those that you FO to are 100% trustworthy? Can you HONESTLY hold to that 100% of the time for now in to perpetuity? Can you HONESTLY say that one of those you hold in trust today will still be trustworthy tomorrow?

Yes. Is this some sort of rarity on LJ?

THAT is the issue. FRIENDITTO allows for anonymity.

The irony of posting this in an anonymous comment is remarkable.

And being affiliated with LJDrama who has such a stellar record for drama and wank?

If you mean being maintained and coded by the same two people, I suppose so.

Not a ringing endorsement in my mind.

I'm sure they're crying their eyes out at the lack of endorsement from an anonymous commenter on LJ, but did it ever occur to you that if you don't want people on the internet knowing your business, you shouldn't tell people on the internet about your business?

From:

girlvinyl.livejournal.com

That's a really good point. And Frienditto isn't a new concept by any means. There are tons of methods available, including elaboratly written progams to help someone copy private and friendslocked entriers. Frienditto is a technological advance and makes things more efficient, therefor it is the fault of the DEVELOPERS and never ever the users.

Let us not have innovation for fear that people will use ift for naughty things. I think that's the best way to go.

From:

frawst.livejournal.com

It's a very nifty piece of code definitely...but c'mon...what are the NON-naughty uses for Friendditto? What are the non-drama/wank/mockthestupid uses for it? Honest question.

From:

girlvinyl.livejournal.com

I don't have time to type out a bunch of uses cause I am late for a haircut. Heh. However, if you read some of the entires before the deluge, there are people archiving personal threats of physical violence. And I think FD is a great use for that. If you go to the authorities you at least now have a cache of it from an independant party. Not to mention its anonymous so the person making the threats sort of has to be pissed at everyone in general as opposed to someone specific.

I think one of the WORST uses of frienditto is to archive pages of people saying they hate frienditto. It was ironic at first, not it's just stupid.

From:

pbristow.livejournal.com

You can cache a threatening post locally in several ways, of which the best (legal protection wise) is probably just to print a hard copy and stick it on a bank vault, date-stamped.

A service *similar* to frienditto could be useful as a third party to verify that the post really did exit in the LJ account concerned, and you haven't just created a fake page and printed/stored it.

However... Why would such a service then need to make the entry public? What's needed is a service where you can, at the appropriate time, tell them "I authorise you to allow *this* designated individual/lawyer/whoever access to see *that* post" - Not something that leaves all your archived posts open for all to see!