Welcome to LiveJournal news. If you crave more frequent and detailed news, check out the following journals:

comm_news	Weekly meta-summary of everything!
news	Infrequent, basic, overall news. (this page)
lj_maintenance	Server status and planned downtime annoucements.
changelog	Every little change, as it happens.
lj_dev	LiveJournal technical development & planning
lj_biz	LiveJournal business/marketing development & planning

More Updates
Tuesday, Oct 1st, 2002 -- 8:28 pm

bradfitz

Here are some updates on the previous updates, and some more... Permanent Accounts All 200 sold within a few days, but we kept it open for a week since the purchase rate had slowed down a bunch after the first couple days and we'd told people over email it'd probably be up for at least a week. Servers The company we bought the defective servers from wants $300 each to fix them, and they're being extremely slow and unintelligible in their correspondence. So, we're trying to return them now, then we'll get things from a different vendor. We should've had these things up and running a long, long time ago. Trust us, we're as frustrated dealing with these problems as you are with the site being slow. And we also all use LiveJournal, so that's, umm... twice the frustration. We'll keep you updated on the status. Photo Hosting We got a couple people working on making pretty styles, but progress is slow. There's not much I can do to speed this process up but crack the whip or beg. Well, actually, we're working on server setup documentation to get more developers installing the software and making styles. Account renaming The account renaming service is back: http://www.livejournal.com/rename/ Sorry it went away for so long. But it's all automated now, and everything's done correctly now. We're still charging the $15 fee, though, just so people aren't renaming all the time. (86 Comments | Comment on this)

Updates
Monday, Sep 23rd, 2002 -- 2:09 pm

bradfitz

Some quick updates... Permanent Accounts We're selling another batch of permanent accounts: http://www.livejournal.com/paidaccounts/permanent.bml We do this every 6 months or so, whenever people start mailing us a bunch asking when the next sale is. Read the page linked above for details. Servers Lately the site's kinda slow during peak hours because four servers we recently ordered were defective. One was physically bad, and the other three had a SCSI card, RAID card, and motherboard that weren't compatible with each other. When we get those back from the vendor fixed, we'll have more than enough database power for awhile. We're pretty disappointed that the vendor told us the machines went through testing, when they obviously didn't. Once school starts everywhere, load will pick up a bunch. We'll be adding some new webservers ahead of time to be ready for that. (luckily, with hardware as simple as a webserver, it's hard for a vendor to mess up the configuration) Photo Hosting The last few months I've been working on a new project, fotobilder, which is yet another photo management site, but designed to be easily customizable, highly scalable, and integrate with other sites. It's mostly done now, but needs to be prettied-up before its release. When that's done, LiveJournal users with paid accounts will get so much free disk space and bandwidth at pics.livejournal.com. (Details yet to be decided.) In addition to hosting full-sized pictures, you'll also be able to host more userpics. (more than the limit of 10) If you're a web designer with free time and at least some experience doing OO-programming, you should join the fotobilder community and help us make pretty layouts. And yes, I know we've talked about doing photo hosting for many years now. In the past I never did it because it was too large of a project to just cram into LiveJournal as some sub-feature. I didn't want the use of journalling or photo hosting to necessitate the use of the other. Making it an entirely separate site (picpix.com), but heavily integrated solves the problem. More details on this as we get closer to a launch date. (83 Comments | Comment on this)

New login system
Thursday, Aug 8th, 2002 -- 1:22 pm

bradfitz

About 20 minutes ago we put live the new login system. Because it uses a new cookie format, everybody got logged out. Sure enough, three bugs were reported immediately. (And each of them a few hundred times, no less.) We do test this stuff for quite awhile before putting it live, but a half million testers is always better than 20. Anyway, bugs are fixed, and as the first one was serious, we logged everybody out again. That's why it seems that you can't stay logged in. Sorry, things should stabilize soon here. There are lots of advantages to the new login system which make this half hour of pain worth it. (357 Comments | Comment on this)

Say hello to alanj!
Monday, Aug 5th, 2002 -- 12:31 pm

bradfitz

We've got a new LiveJournal employee... say hello to alanj! Alan's been using LiveJournal for ages and did a ton of work making the code easily usable for other sites when it was first open-sourced a couple years back. Right now I try to be the lead programmer, sysadmin, and business guy, in addition to working on a new project. It's just too much. As a result, I've been neglecting certain responsibilities due to time limitations. Alan's job is going to be gradually taking on a number of my responsibilities, leaving me more time to give love to the neglected areas, and be able to step back occasionally and see the big picture, deciding which areas need work. Anyway, if you suddenly start seeing him post more often in the various lj_* communities, now you'll know why. :-) (41 Comments | Comment on this)

Password security
Saturday, Jul 20th, 2002 -- 10:05 pm

bradfitz

In the past week or so, the number of stolen accounts has been on the rise. The reason is that there are a number of "brute force" programs out there now to sit around for hours, trying to guess an account's password. So, what did we do to combat it? Three things: 1) We finished our rate-limiting framework and applied it towards failed logins. A brute force program is now severely limited in how fast it can try and guess your password. (Further, we can now see attacks happening in real-time and notify the ISP) 2) We implemented password quality checks throughout the site. When you login, you're now told if your password is easily guessable and tells you to go change it. Also, you can't change your password to something weak, and you can't create a new account with a weak password. We analyzed all the existing passwords, and a pathetic number are trivially brute-forceable. If you see the warning text, please, go change your password. 3) If your account is "hacked" in the future, or already has been, you can delete the hacker's email address, mail the changed password to your old one, and change your password. The trick to this was that there was never a tool for you to delete the hacker's password in the past. There is now: /tools/emailmanage.bml Best, it doesn't let the hacker delete your old email address. We'll continue to work on improving security. In the meantime, however, don't use "password" for your password. Thanks. :) (260 Comments | Comment on this)