A bulk post shredding tool for LJ

[crazyscot]

As a visual protest, I wrote a tool that bulk-shreds the contents of an LJ.

In case anybody wishes to join me, I have shared the tool. ljshred@github | just the script. You'll need Python 2.7. Command-line only. No warranty. Use at own risk. May contain nuts.

I may or may not delete my LJ now that I have run this, but for the time being you can see the effect over on http://crazyscot.livejournal.com/ .

Comments

[marahmarie]

When I saw "shredded" I figured "deleted", "blanked out", "gone" - then I saw it. Neatest thing ever. Looking at it, I thought: "base64", "something based on binary", and of cryptography in general, before it hit me: "Oh, so that's what they mean by "shredded"!"

My question is, can it be reverse engineered, or is all the text forever gone (and edit: I don't mean "can this be reversed" - I read the instructions. I mean, literally, "can it be reverse engineered"? There is a difference)?

[crazyscot]

The text is completely replaced with blocks, or randomly-chosen garbage, at your option. The shredded entry contains nothing of the original text.

Technically, a tiny amount of information is retained: in both cases I leave spaces as they are, so the entry looks "word-shaped" and you can quickly figure out the lengths of the words, but there are no further clues as to what the letters and punctuation are. I don't personally think this is enough to worry about, and the primary goal of my tool was the visual effect, not full information-theoretic security.

[marahmarie]

Thanks for clarifying. Anyone who has their LJ set to be indexed by search engines will still leave behind caches that defeat using this for security (at least until the caches are updated to reflect all the junk data, but from my experience Google will focus on the most frequently touched/accessed pages and many other pages approximately never) but assuming indexing was not allowed to begin with on a journal, this does look and sound fairly hard to reverse engineer for the average, non-determined person. And awesome to look at, besides. :)

[crazyscot]

I'm not sure how I found this out, but I once discovered that all my public LJ posts had been duplicated by some random bot and put up on a server that was largely Russian-language. Most peculiar.

[marahmarie]

Yeah, that does sound kind of weird, though not too surprising - if you had your LJ indexed by search engines and it was placing well for keywords the Russian site wanted to place well for, that might have been why - Google has a strange way of handling that, or at least did when I used it from 2005-2010 - it would rank sites that used underhanded SEO and crazy amounts of backlinks to one another better than it would rank LJs, while blissfully ignoring that the content was scraped from an LJ to begin with (a fact that should have sunk it in search rankings pretty much instantly). I really don't miss those days.