“Extermination & Acts of Genocide”: Human Rights Watch on Israel Deliberately Depriving Gaza of Water

AMY GOODMAN: So, can I ask you, Bill Van Esveld, is this the first time that Human Rights Watch is accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza?

BILL VAN ESVELD: This is the first time that we’ve made a finding of genocidal acts in Gaza. It is not an accusation that we level lightly. We have not done this very often in our history. We accused the Myanmar military of genocidal acts against the Rohingya in 2017, and we found full-blown genocide against the Kurds in Saddam Hussein’s Anfal campaign in Iraq in the ’80s — sorry, in the ’90s, and we found genocide against — also in Rwanda in the ’80s. It is, you know, an extremely difficult crime to prove. It is, you know, mass killing deliberately to destroy people because they’re part of the group, not something we level lightly, but, yes, we found it here.

On Wednesday 12/04 at 7pm, the Austin Indieweb Meetup returns to Radio Coffee and Beer. Count me in.

We made a roadtrip one last time to Wimberly to see her perform at the Devil’s Backbone Tavern in August 2023.

There was no one like Toni Price.

Today, a post in my feed included a mention and its webfinger verification threw a WebFinger::BadRequest exception:

Nov 08 09:18:49 AM  WebFinger::BadRequest (Bad Request):
Nov 08 09:18:49 AM 
Nov 08 09:18:49 AM  app/models/account.rb:79:in `fetch_and_create_mastodon_account'
Nov 08 09:18:49 AM  app/models/account.rb:367:in `block in create_status!'
Nov 08 09:18:49 AM  app/models/account.rb:364:in `each'
Nov 08 09:18:49 AM  app/models/account.rb:364:in `create_status!'
Nov 08 09:18:49 AM  app/lib/activity_pub/activity/create.rb:20:in `perform'
Nov 08 09:18:49 AM  app/controllers/accounts_controller.rb:148:in `process_item'
Nov 08 09:18:49 AM  app/controllers/accounts_controller.rb:75:in `inbox'

The activitypub actor document resided on mastodon.well.com but when a reverse discovery was performed, the hostname of the subject in the webfinger response was well.com instead of mastodon.well.com. Making a webfinger request to well.com for the mentioned user returned a 500 Internal Server Error so a WebFinger::BadRequest exception was thrown. What was going on?

Fortunately, an issue in the activitypub-webfinger had the answer:

Looks like some are using this host-meta redirect to use a custom domain for actors which is different to the actual domain of the server.

And that is what was happening:

curl https://mastodon.well.com/.well-known/host-meta
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<XRD xmlns="http://docs.oasis-open.org/ns/xri/xrd-1.0">
  <Link rel="lrdd" template="https://mastodon.well.com/.well-known/webfinger?resource={uri}"/>
</XRD>

A response in the issue notes

The use of host-meta as a “second layer of indirection” is something that mostly a holdover from the OStatus days, IIRC. Most projects that aren’t Mastodon or Pleroma will not check host-meta at all, and will instead always skip straight to the /.well-known/webfinger endpoint. I don’t think it makes sense to unnecessarily pressure everyone into adopting host-meta or supporting variable LRDD endpoints

I can’t argue with that so I just handled the exception without setting the custom domain.

After some time off IndieWeb Meetup Austin is back at Mozart’s Coffee tonight at 7pm. I guess a few things have transpired since the last meeting so I’m looking forward to learning about what’s going on again.