Dear Users, unfortunately, I have to shut the site down. Before I explain why, know that everyone can export their icebergs on their Settings page, with the Request an archive of all my profile and iceberg data button. You will receive a notification when the export is ready and a "Download archive" button will appear. The icebergs are exported as both raw .json data and .html files which, together with the static folder that contains the images and necessary scripts, works independently of icebergcharts.com. You can view them with a browser or serve them on your own websites if you have one. The site will still be up for a year or so, only registration and creating new icebergs will be disabled, though editing will be disabled at some point too (expect in one or two months or so, maybe later). Even if this site dies, your icebergs will live on. And the great idea that icebergs represent will never die. As to why, this has to happen because I have realized that I am unable to properly secure the site. Last year, someone managed to get access to my developer account, and only a few days ago I discovered a hacking attempt. In both cases I am still unable to tell how they did it or what they did, and if they behaved maliciously - and if the incidents may be related. Something like this might really affect all users - I cannot guarantee the security or privacy of the site. Furthermore, the site has also been brought down several times by denial of service attacks and extreme, nonconsensual, illegal AI scraping. It also gets frequently scanned for vulnerabilities by malicious scanners, and with AI becoming smarter I expect this to only get worse and more dangerous. These are the reasons I have to shut the site down now, but there is also another problem which has been weighing on me for a long time and sooner than later would have become another sufficient reason: the amount of work and time required for moderation - approving icebergs, responding to moderation reports, and banning users when necessary when they break the content rules or terms of service. Banning users altogether has only rarely been necessary, 99.9% of users behave perfectly fine, it's maybe just 0.1% of all users whose behavior has been a problem. But due to some, I even had to get the police involved. The larger the site got, the more frequent and worse these incidents became. It could only last this long as it did because it grew slowly enough that I could somewhat keep up with moderation. The time where the volunteer moderators or I could check every entry on every iceberg has long passed though, and the moderation queues grow increasingly long. Moderation is an incredibly (emotionally) exhausting, stressful, and mostly thankless task. I encountered a lot of hatred and people with a presumptuous sense of entitlement, dissatisfied with the rules or my decisions, despite these being the only way for me to run the site in a good conscience and relative inner peace. I do hope they learn to program and create their own sites - learn what it takes to make and maintain something like this, to have such responsibility, to bear the costs. I was hoping for alternative sites to appear for a while, but some people prefer to keep complaining instead. Despite these gloomy news, I want to thank all users for creating so many interesting iceberg charts, and actually being creative, devoted and nice. A special big thank you goes out to the volunteer moderators- Otter64, thebestytper, equarep, Blu, 1mvghost, gooiff, HeadInAMicrowave, IAmALittleConfused, ThatGuy159, Cassandria, thesavegecabege, Null and I apologize if I've forgotten anyone - who helped me approve and sort icebergs, and moderate the comment sections, as well as to the many (some, very early) supporters and those of you who contributed their art, or ideas, or constructive feedback. Thanks to all of you, I consider this site to have been a success. I wish you all the best. coda, icebergcharts.com admin A note for technologists Our programming languages and operating systems are SHIT. Why? Because they fail to give us guarantees which we would need to build secure software. Can you reliably tell, reason and assure yourself and your users about what your code does? What is actually running on your system? What it might have access to, and what not? Which and how many resources it will or may use? The answer, for all contemporarily popular programming languages and operating systems is a resounding NO. Usually, any part of a program's code may access any other part, or anything in the filesystem, or networks. This is horrendous. A single compromise compromises the entire system, irreversibly. People come up with a bajillion schemes, like signature schemes, or user verification in package repositories. These do not prevent supply chain attacks, or a compromised or malicious user breaking this social trust mechanism. Another common approach is using virtual machines, but these are way too coarse grained in their isolation, and a PITA to use! All these SUCK, because they do not address the actual source of the problem, which is that our systems do not allow enforcing the Principle of least privilege by secure compartmentalization at a more fine grained level. Not every part of every system needs or should have access to everything. Reducing, "hollowing out" the attack surface is key! EVERY programming language should allow the restriction of certain sections of programs, or imported modules to pure computation, or access only to a limited set of capabilities. But they don't, they are fundamentally broken, and this makes the entire world vulnerable. Capability-based security is in fact the name for the discipline and architecture that mitigates this problem. Capabilities bring the concept of transferable rights into the digital world. Each (part of a) program can only access and consume the resources it has been explicitly granted access to. Most of our systems and institutions have architectures that originated in the pre-internet era or arose in high-trust environments and therefore do not sufficiently consider the consequences of a lack of security. This is a civilization-scale problem, and the right tools are missing. This little civilization, consisting of over 64000 users will cease to exist because of it, and I expect this to happen more and more often until the right tools are supported and enter use at scale. The convenience and power of popular systems and tools made them the trap I fell into - they were insufficient for the scale this website evolved into, and the hostile environment it exists in.