Txp cookies, visitor logging, and GDPR stuff in general

michaelkpate · 2018-08-01 15:49:33

phiw13 wrote #313200:

I hope that by “the Left” you mean the Democratic party (US edition), which is (and always has been) a fairly right of center thing (I try to remain polite… family site etc) and known to be very good at doubling down on their mistakes. Other people call it simply the “fake left”.

I meant the Progressive Movement in the United States which I tend to differentiate from the less-authoritarian and more-centrist Liberal one.

Wilson shared the general Progressive critique that the Founders’ Constitution was antiquated, and that capitalism and industrialization were unfair and exploitative, as he discussed in The New Freedom. He, like all Progressives, believed that the nation needed serious reform. By the time Wilson was elected president in 1912, he had already developed his intellectual and practical plan for the new role of the modern state. In order to achieve the ends of a new government, Wilson justified his expansion of federal power as a necessary response to the crisis of industrial modernization. The root of the industrial problem, as Wilson saw it, lay in the cause of industrialism itself: corporations and free-market capitalism. In his argument against corporations and in favor of government control over the economy, Wilson espoused the Progressive view that at the time of the Founders the government did not need to play an active role in regulating the economy. However, in the new industrial age, nothing but the government could protect the worker. Corporations violated what Wilson identified as the democratic equal opportunity of the people, subjecting the people to impersonal control, exploitation, and dangerous working conditions. To alleviate the stranglehold of corporations on the American worker, Wilson suggested that it is the duty of government “to subordinate corporations to the public interest.” Since corporations have stripped the individual of their strength, “the moralizer and disciplinarian of corporations can in the nature of the case be none other than the government itself.” Wilson did not believe that the role of government could any longer be restricted to the protection equal rights under law, but that, in the new age of industrial abuse, it must also guarantee some measure of economic equality and promote more equal employer-employee relationships to prevent exploitation. – Progressivism and the Executive Branch: Woodrow Wilson’s Expansion of Presidential Power

Prior to Wilson, who was our President from 1913-1921, we generally had a fairly weak Executive Model and the Federal Government had little direct involvement in people’s lives. Most things were left to the Individual states. I’d like to see us return to that, and again being political, Trump affords everyone an opportunity to agree with me. Instead the argument is that we want the Government to have even more power to prevent something like Trump happening again.

Robert Heinlein wrote a Novel, Revolt in 2100, in 1953 about an America where a Reality Star (an evangelist in the story) uses his personal popularity to become President by winning the Election in 2012 (remarkable close to 2016) and converts the US into an Isolated Theocracy.

Social Media was a means to an end but it isn’t the actual problem.

Destry · 2018-08-03 14:44:20

Back from a week vacation and feeling half-decent, except for the damn plantar fasciitis I seem to be suffering after trying to get into the running routine again. Bah!

colak wrote #313204:

I can not see how this law will make the web/world better.

I’m not saying it will. My sole point of saying anything about it at all was with respect to the GDPR, and that even in the bad ol’ US of A, some political dirt wad of red or blue nature is thinking about it. Harkening back to earlier exchanges in this thread about if/when other countries would adopt such laws. Whether or not anyone likes them is beside my point. What I’m saying is they will likely come, even in the US.

Michael, phiw13,

I think I’ve stated my position somewhere in these boards at least once over the years how much I despise both parties, indeed the entire US political system.

Changing the subject (and this rightly should go into a new thread, but maybe it will effectively end this one)…

I now despite the US gov even more so (if that’s possible) after having read this fascinating and sad piece of research. (Warning, that’s a long piece. Very worth it. Read the Epilogue if nothing else.) That’s not about any of this stupid web stuff or it’s trivialities, but about how effed up we are as a energy-glutton society, with the US square in the middle of it. There’s also a lot of undertones through that work about communication strategy on climate awareness etc, which I find fascinating too, but that’s something else as well.

Getting back to Colak,

There is no ‘better’ outcome, at least not before the collapse, and we won’t know either way. We might want to be thankful for not making it that long.

So how about those forest fires in Sweden?

Maybe I’ll shave my beard today.

Update: beard shaved.

colak · 2018-08-05 14:37:19

It’s been a slow weekend so I thought I’ll share a pre-GDPR video about ways of dealing with unsolicited (spam) emails… For those who did not watch it before, enjoy:)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dceyy0cX6J4

michaelkpate · 2018-08-07 17:20:08

More than two months after the GDPR took effect, hundreds of U.S. news websites — including digital properties operated by Tronc, Lee Enterprises and GateHouse Media — are unavailable in Europe, frustrating many American tourists, business travelers, and ex-pats as well as Europeans interested in news from the States. – More than 1,000 U.S. news sites are still unavailable in Europe, two months after GDPR took effect

Exactly why it scares me when I hear Americans we need a version of GDPR here in the United States.

jakob · 2018-08-07 21:19:42

michaelkpate wrote #313324:

Exactly why it scares me when I hear Americans we need a version of GDPR here in the United States.

What a lot of finger pointing! For me, the most telling sentence in that whole article is mentioned in passing:

“Internet traffic on our local news sites originating from the EU and EEA is de minimis, and we believe blocking that traffic is in the best interest of our local media clients,” Arms said.

Apart from the fact that it’s illogical – some readers from the EU who consent to cookies certainly bring in more advertising revenue than none at all – surely building a following and cultivating a readership is based on good journalism. By cutting off their foreign readers (and their domestic readers travelling abroad) they are doing themselves an almighty disservice at the very core of their actual raison d’être. More worryingly, they are also creating a hole in the news landscape that less scrupulous “news” services will gladly fill with less worthy (more inflammatory) journalism.

I don’t for a minute believe that US news outlets truly think US politics is not of interest to foreign readers. It is in fact vital to address the skew in news reporting on the USA from outside the USA.
Nor do I believe that the cost of implementing GDPR compliance outweighs the benefit of providing their service. While it is without doubt a more complex task for a large news outlet than it is for a small company or association, they also have proportionally more resources available to them than the average internet smallholder in Europe. Most large newspapers in Europe have managed or are managing to do so.

The sad truth, I fear, is that they are more beholden to their advertisers than their readers and ultimately even their own potential influence and reach.

michaelkpate · 2018-08-08 00:59:31

jakob wrote #313329:

Nor do I believe that the cost of implementing GDPR compliance outweighs the benefit of providing their service.

Without GDPR, American newspapers are going out of business all over the place.

Tiny papers have little competition, an enduring connection with their towns, and thus still are able to attract advertising and reader loyalty. The largest of the papers — including the New York Times and The Washington Post — are finding new ways to support themselves with a combination of digital ad dollars and subscriptions, among other revenue sources. But the regional papers, such as the Denver Post, have taken the worst hits. And to make matters worse, many are owned by hedge funds that couldn’t care less about journalism. They are only interested in bleeding the papers dry of whatever remaining profits they can produce with ever-shrinking staffs. – The local-news crisis is destroying what a divided America desperately needs: Common ground

The regional daily newspaper my parents subscribed to most of their lives, the Tampa Tribune, went completely out of business in 2016, after it was purchased by the chief competitor, the Tampa Bay Times. The Times is a non-profit funded by a grant from the Knight Family Foundation, so it actually doesn’t need to make money. It also never served the non-metro parts of the Tampa Bay Area and still doesn’t. So even if I wanted to subscribe to the print edition, I couldn’t.

Basically the newspapers that are left are burning through reserves and are making major cutbacks – the NY Post cut their staff in half a few weeks ago, the LA Times had to move out of their 80-year-old officers because they could no longer afford the rent. They aren’t making enough money to cover expenses. Complying with GDPR will mean that they will make even less revenue.

Yes, European newspapers have survived over the last two months. It remains to see if what they did to comply was sufficient enough for regulators and even if it was if they can afford it.

Destry · 2018-08-08 08:59:38

I think I’m circling on a point mentioned a while ago in this thread, but most news is redundant as hell. If one rag dries up there’s a dozen others carrying the same stories. People need to lose their allegiences unless they’re paying for them.

The article cherry picks the Gazzette shooter story and the guy trying to find the news in the local Maryland paper, or wherever it was. He didn’t have to look only there. I find the story in dozens of other sources. Smaller stories that would only interest locals don’t interest readers elsewhere anyway. (‘Farmer Talbert’s cow had a two-headed calf as lightning cracked the old oak tree on main street.’). Meh, finding world-worthy news in English isn’t hard.

On the flipside, a lot of US sites that are available to EU are acting like they’re compliant but are not by a long way. I’d rather a site blocked me out than continued to sell me to third-party ad networks, and passing the buck to them for opting out, all contrary to the laws and my rights so they can keep doing ad-tech exploitation business as usual. This is complained about a lot on masto and people are starting to report these sites to their data authorities.

If anything, I’d expext things to be in turmoil for a while as this big experiment plays out. I’m not scared at all. On the contrary I’m out for the blood of publishers who keep enabling ad networks.

There will always be news online as long as there’s an internet. It doesn’t bother me we cull the sources down while ad-tech is weened out. What bothers me is publishers acting compliant but aren’t.

If somebody replies, ‘but lack of news competition means state controlled media and government jackboots!’, then I’ll just say, ‘that’s already happening in places. And in any case, if we can’t even get news right, how are we supposed to come together as a global society to stave of climate disaster‽ Lol. Goodbye, world.’

colak · 2018-08-25 10:56:44

Another month, the same struggle. Say No to censorship. Save the internet. Cast your vote here.

gaekwad · 2018-08-26 14:04:57

Destry wrote #313339:

[…]

Hey Destry – I emailed you (first name at last name domain) Aug 17 and never heard back – check your last name website SSL.

michaelkpate · 2018-08-28 16:17:40

But latest challenge to our collective security comes not from Facebook or Google or Russian hackers or Cambridge Analytica: it comes from the Australian government. Their new proposed “Access and Assistance” bill would require the operators of all of that technology to comply with broad and secret government orders, free from liability, and hidden from independent oversight. Software could be rewritten to spy on end-users; websites re-engineered to deliver spyware. Our technology would have to serve two masters: their customers, and what a broad array of Australian government departments decides are the “interests of Australia’s national security.” Australia would not be the last to demand these powers: a long line of countries are waiting to demand the same kind of “assistance.” – Trust Us, We’re Secretly Working for a Foreign Government: How Australia’s Proposed Surveillance Laws Will Break The Trust Tech Depends On

Destry · 2018-08-28 19:01:02

gaekwad wrote #313644:

Hey Destry – I emailed you (first name at last name domain) Aug 17 and never heard back – check your last name website SSL.

I saw the email. But for reasons I can’t explain or figure out, I can’t reply to you via that account. Pretty sure it’s a Apple/SMTP thing, but I really don’t know. It’s not just you, it’s everybody that contacts me that way. I can’t seem to reply.

In any case, if you use the forum contact, it gets to the proper account (not the one you indicate, which is so poisoned by spam anyway I think I’m going to kill it and Apple Mail.app).

As for the SSL, they expired and I’ve been too f-ing unconcerned to give a shite because the sites are still under dev anyway. :)

I know. Believe me, I know. Here I am with all this GDPR raving and come the 25 May I don’t even deliver. My life is off rails right now and I don’t know how to recover. It’s like I’m watching my house burn and I’m throwing wood on the fire while laughing like a fool.

There are days I don’t even want to be online any more, in any way. Period. And those days seem to be more and more frequent. I can’t explain it. It all seems so pointless.

Anyway, thanks for the reminder. I’ll drudge on over to WebFiction and walk through the motions.

bici · 2018-08-28 19:58:05

Destry – Take it day by day. I would take long walks through the fields. Take in long horizons.

As for Webfaction. I am ready to give up on them getting LetsEncrypt ready for prime time anytime soon.

I am ready to move to another hosting entity. Anyone have some recommendations?

colak · 2018-09-17 06:03:46

Here’s an academic article which argues about machine learning models and algorithmic accountability through GDPR.

michaelkpate · 2018-10-10 13:45:16

michaelkpate wrote #311608:

And in the end the two companies that benefit most from GDPR will be Facebook and Google because it will so devastate their smaller competitors.

The first empirical data is in.

One thing is certain: Google benefits indirectly from the effects of the GDPR, which led the online advertising market in Europe to become more concentrated, as the majority of advertisers lose market share. Google seems to have successfully taken advantage of the uncertainty around GDPR to further solidify its leading market position. On the other hand, many smaller competitors have been steadily losing market share since the GDPR came into effect. – Study: Google is the biggest beneficiary of the GDPR

Destry · 2018-10-10 15:27:00

I read this earlier and then wondered how long until you chimed in. ;)

It’s only been 4 months, and in any case, it seems to me GDPR is doing its job, based on the section, Less trackers per site. There they show that in the EU tracking is down, while in the corrupt US (corrupt Google’s domain), tracking is way up, which as they add, is no small part due to dark patterns being used that don’t play by GDPR guidelines:

This is not least due to the fact that many consent management tools use manipulative UX design (so-called dark patterns) to nudge users towards particular choices and actions that may be against their own interests. They trick the users into clicking away these pesky privacy consent notices and thus “consent” to any kind of data collection.

No surprise. That ‘Controller’ behavior just fits with the US’s outward MO anymore: dishonest and underhanded. Said as an American.

As I’ve made clear for myself before, I’m specifically pulling for the GDPR to impact the ad-tech tracking industry. The less ad-tracking the better. If that impacts news media, whether in the EU or not, that’s not my concern. I don’t work for those companies and don’t care about them.

Maybe by weeding out the ad-tech players, more fight is eventually given to the giant. And Gargle hasn’t been winning points in the news lately. It seems like every day there’s a new article showing how Google is literally screwing us.

Also said before, there will always be news, regardless of what happens to current mainstream channels. The streets need pressure washed of the ad-tracking pollution, no matter what the cost. In fact we could do with more independent news upstarts that don’t pander to Google.

So, folks, I can only offer this, I guess: stop visiting US websites, and quit your Google accounts already.

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#451 2018-08-01 15:49:33

Re: Txp cookies, visitor logging, and GDPR stuff in general

phiw13 wrote #313200:

#452 2018-08-03 14:44:20

Re: Txp cookies, visitor logging, and GDPR stuff in general

colak wrote #313204:

#453 2018-08-05 14:37:19

Re: Txp cookies, visitor logging, and GDPR stuff in general

#454 2018-08-07 17:20:08

Re: Txp cookies, visitor logging, and GDPR stuff in general

#455 2018-08-07 21:19:42

Re: Txp cookies, visitor logging, and GDPR stuff in general

michaelkpate wrote #313324:

#456 2018-08-08 00:59:31

Re: Txp cookies, visitor logging, and GDPR stuff in general

jakob wrote #313329:

#457 2018-08-08 08:59:38

Re: Txp cookies, visitor logging, and GDPR stuff in general

#458 2018-08-25 10:56:44

Re: Txp cookies, visitor logging, and GDPR stuff in general

#459 2018-08-26 14:04:57

Re: Txp cookies, visitor logging, and GDPR stuff in general

Destry wrote #313339:

#460 2018-08-28 16:17:40

Re: Txp cookies, visitor logging, and GDPR stuff in general

#461 2018-08-28 19:01:02

Re: Txp cookies, visitor logging, and GDPR stuff in general

gaekwad wrote #313644:

#462 2018-08-28 19:58:05

Re: Txp cookies, visitor logging, and GDPR stuff in general

#463 2018-09-17 06:03:46

Re: Txp cookies, visitor logging, and GDPR stuff in general

#464 2018-10-10 13:45:16

Re: Txp cookies, visitor logging, and GDPR stuff in general

michaelkpate wrote #311608:

#465 2018-10-10 15:27:00

Re: Txp cookies, visitor logging, and GDPR stuff in general

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