Sorry to hear about your ordeal, things will get better with sufficient time even if they seem bleak now. Do you think you would enjoy the legal profession? There are also lots of other careers you could enter into that are interesting and challenging, and for which a law degree would have prepared you well.
Why is it that you can't make your arguments politely, without calling other commenters names? Trolls will be called out as trolls till they stop being trolls...
Unlikely to have much to do with mod preferences, other than perhaps being a bit too permissive sometimes, but mostly troll preferences. A valid point can be made to try ban all inter-college trolling posts, or those that are likely to be become such posts...
Please keep the electioneering / election-related chatter, allegations and counter-allegations down, LI is not and should not become a politics reddit / WhatsApp group.
If you want to share posts about news that you think are noteworthy, relevant to lawyers or a cause worthy of more attention, next time please do so in a manner that is bona fide and not to relativise other causes or for thinly garbed political point scoring / trolling.
Somewhat off topic, and honestly, don't have any information about your specific post or that such a thing as a 'celebrity mediator' exists, so can't comment on specifics. But sometimes moderators may collectively or individually decide not publish comments for various persons, but it's nearly never to protect 'powers that be', but more likely to protect LI, if there is no way for us to confirm or corroborate the accuracy of the comment or it has been reported as inaccurate, defamatory, etc.
Yes, your understanding of the 3 layers and the practical impossibility of reverse engineering it, is basically correct.
And yes, we do not keep any unencrypted original_ip_address in any database or log files, to the best of our knowledge (because if we intentionally did, what would be the point in going through the effort of encryption?). The original IP is used only to create the emojis, and is not written to any database or file.
In terms of why we go through the effort to store anything at all, even if encrypted: mostly to combat some spammy or malicious comments or bots, so we can block a single emojified IP address that posts a lot of crap in any 24 hour period.
But you're right, ultimately, you kind of have to trust that it works the way we say it does, and that we don't have a reason to want to have access to your personal information such as IP addresses or emails, and we don't want to secretly store such information. But like on any other website on the rest of the internet, the only real defense, if you're really worried, is to use a VPN or Tor, so we never even have access to your IP address in the first place and you don't even have to trust us to not ever store it.
Thanks for stress testing our system - you really shouldn't be able to see your own Emoji IP, so we'll try to fix that (have redacted the details of your post in the meantime so we don't get drowned in spam :)
If you're interested in technical details about whether this is strong enough, would welcome your feedback. Tldr, it is intended to be fairly cryptographically and practically secure. [If you're technically inclined, here are the boring details: your IP address is first 'salted' (sprinkled) with a random sequence of 40 letters that gets regenerated approximately daily, then 'hashed' with SHA384 (akin to a one-way encryption that can not be reversed), and then three partial character sequences of the hash are converted into three out of more than 1000 emojis. And even if it was theoretically possible to reverse engineer it, approximately after a day the old 'salt' is deleted and a new one is generated.]
Hope that helps and always happy for feedback and more tests.
Apologies for the delay.
Ergo: disingenuous troll post.
Moral of story: accuracy matters, even when shit posting.
And yes, we do not keep any unencrypted original_ip_address in any database or log files, to the best of our knowledge (because if we intentionally did, what would be the point in going through the effort of encryption?). The original IP is used only to create the emojis, and is not written to any database or file.
In terms of why we go through the effort to store anything at all, even if encrypted: mostly to combat some spammy or malicious comments or bots, so we can block a single emojified IP address that posts a lot of crap in any 24 hour period.
But you're right, ultimately, you kind of have to trust that it works the way we say it does, and that we don't have a reason to want to have access to your personal information such as IP addresses or emails, and we don't want to secretly store such information. But like on any other website on the rest of the internet, the only real defense, if you're really worried, is to use a VPN or Tor, so we never even have access to your IP address in the first place and you don't even have to trust us to not ever store it.
If you're interested in technical details about whether this is strong enough, would welcome your feedback. Tldr, it is intended to be fairly cryptographically and practically secure. [If you're technically inclined, here are the boring details: your IP address is first 'salted' (sprinkled) with a random sequence of 40 letters that gets regenerated approximately daily, then 'hashed' with SHA384 (akin to a one-way encryption that can not be reversed), and then three partial character sequences of the hash are converted into three out of more than 1000 emojis. And even if it was theoretically possible to reverse engineer it, approximately after a day the old 'salt' is deleted and a new one is generated.]
Hope that helps and always happy for feedback and more tests.