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#445 2018-07-30 16:08:23
Re: Txp cookies, visitor logging, and GDPR stuff in general
An oldie but still relevant nocookielaw.com/
Yiannis
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#446 2018-08-01 10:05:17
Re: Txp cookies, visitor logging, and GDPR stuff in general
Granted this is The Register (and the url-title is amusing), but…
Make Facebook, Twitter, Google et al liable for daft garbage netizens post online
Other elements of the proposal include calls for requiring:
- . . .
- adopting data protection rules similar to Europe’s GDPR;
- . . .
There’s a big list of proposed regs that item comes from, and I think this US senator (Democrat) might actually have grasp of tech enough (or decent advisors) to know where to attack the problems. Because leaving it to ‘the users’ to police their own socmed actions is never going to work.
On the other hand, the list is so big it seems very unlikely to succeed, and especially if dems don’t swing back into the saddle.
The point of sharing this though is only to point out yet another sign that gdpr-like policies are gaining favour beyond the EU, and we’re only 4 months out of the gate.
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#447 2018-08-01 12:37:41
Re: Txp cookies, visitor logging, and GDPR stuff in general
Destry wrote #313193:
Because leaving it to ‘the users’ to police their own socmed actions is never going to work. On the other hand, the list is so big it seems very unlikely to succeed, and especially if dems don’t swing back into the saddle. The point of sharing this though is only to point out yet another sign that gdpr-like policies are gaining favour beyond the EU, and we’re only 4 months out of the gate.
This isn’t actually a new idea, especially for the Democratic Party. A century ago, Woodrow Wilson put George Creel in charge of the Committee of Public Information. Oh, and:
President Wilson sponsored the Espionage and Sedition Acts, prohibiting interference with the draft and outlawing criticism of the government, the armed forces, or the war effort. Violators were imprisoned or fined. Some 1,500 people were arrested for violating these laws, including Eugene V. Debs, leader of the Socialist Party. The Post Office was empowered to censor the mail, and more than 400 periodicals were deprived of mailing privileges for greater or lesser periods of time. The Supreme Court upheld the Espionage and Sedition Acts as constitutional. – Woodrow Wilson: Domestic Affairs
Putting on my political hat for just a moment: I was really hoping this entire episode would teach the Left that their obsession with the Strong Executive Model was a really bad idea but, exactly as I feared, they seem to be drawing the wrong conclusions.
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#448 2018-08-01 13:02:59
Re: Txp cookies, visitor logging, and GDPR stuff in general
Destry wrote #313193:
Granted this is The Register (and the url-title is amusing), but…
Make Facebook, Twitter, Google et al liable for daft garbage netizens post online
There’s a big list of proposed regs that item comes from, and I think this US senator (Democrat) might actually have grasp of tech enough (or decent advisors) to know where to attack the problems. Because leaving it to ‘the users’ to police their own socmed actions is never going to work (…)
Hmm. a few points in that list are maybe (maybe!) worth thinking about, but much is typical “liberal” (in the US definition of it) nanny state, sorry.
michaelkpate wrote #313196:
Putting on my political hat for just a moment: I was really hoping this entire episode would teach the Left that their obsession with the Strong Executive Model was a really bad idea but, exactly as I feared, they seem to be drawing the wrong conclusions.
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”.
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#449 2018-08-01 13:21:18
Re: Txp cookies, visitor logging, and GDPR stuff in general
So the problem is not so much the collected info but What is done with it… How it is used. I’m talking about:
- The big data hoarded by the big companies
- The big data collected by governments (I had to put this one here too).
Small to medium site sizes which is what consist most of the net, are not the enemy (depending on their content of course). This law was voted in, not so much for any such sites but because of the big boys. As such, they are passing blanket laws because of them, and the rest of us try to comply. The big companies basic response is that if anyone wants to continue to use their services, they will have to accept to be monitored and monetised.
I can not see how this law will make the web/world better.
Yiannis
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#450 2018-08-01 13:49:45
Re: Txp cookies, visitor logging, and GDPR stuff in general
Destry wrote #310778:
Well, every web server records IP address, doesn’t it?
No. Many (most?) do, but logging can be very specific and include/exclude info. There’s also the YAGNI movement who don’t care two hoots about that kind of info.
My go-to web server is Nginx (thanks largely to makss making Textpattern officially Nginx-friendly). There’re a handful of directives that define the level of logging, and the format. So, at a global level, I have this directive:
log_format ipscrubbed '$remote_addr_ipscrub - $remote_user [$time_local] "$request" $status $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" "$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for" "$gzip_ratio"';This defines a log format called ipscrubbed and the fields within said log format. I compile Nginx from source because I use ipscrub which smushes the IP address into a salted hash, and rotates the hash every 7 days. I can see who’s misbehaving, but I can’t block that person at an IP level – user agent, that I can do something with (so I can block bots etc), but thugs who bounce around on VPN/Tor IPs are always going to be a step ahead.
I’m learning how naxsi works at the moment, so I can roll that out as well. That’s a web application firewall with rules, rather than a list of bad actors to block.
Challenges right now include figuring out how to handle error logs. They can’t be defined in the same way as access logs, so I have to be careful about how long I store the error logs for. The error logs are critical errors rather than simple 404s etc, so it’s usually things that have exploded or backfired in some way.
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#451 2018-08-01 15:49:33
Re: Txp cookies, visitor logging, and GDPR stuff in general
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.
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#452 2018-08-03 14:44:20
Re: Txp cookies, visitor logging, and GDPR stuff in general
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.
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#453 2018-08-05 14:37:19
Re: Txp cookies, visitor logging, and GDPR stuff in general
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:)
Yiannis
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#454 2018-08-07 17:20:08
Re: Txp cookies, visitor logging, and GDPR stuff in general
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.
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#455 2018-08-07 21:19:42
Re: Txp cookies, visitor logging, and GDPR stuff in general
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.
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#456 2018-08-08 00:59:31
Re: Txp cookies, visitor logging, and GDPR stuff in general
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.
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