Posted on
by
Letter to Santa

You’ve probably all seen this joke before. This tweet is the earliest mention I can find but please do correct me in the comments if you have an original source!

There have been a few “take downs” of this joke but this one is probably the most thorough.

My take is that whether you are naughty or nice might be considered special category data and he needs specific consent to process that. He’s presumably collecting the naughty/nice data from elsewhere too, and doesn’t appear to notify anyone that he has obtained it. And I am sure he is making decisions using automated processing to which you haven’t been able to object.

But that is not why I am here today.

I am not a data protection “expert” but I reckon I know more than most. In the UK, the Information Commissioners Office (ICO) is responsible for enforcing the data protection rules. However, there must be thousands of insignificant breaches of the DPA everyday that the ICO will never hear about, let alone touch.

Personally, it makes me VERY cross when people misuse my data. I can’t take any legal action against them but I can name and shame them. So I am going to.

I don’t think we should pretend that 30,000 Twitter users is a representative sample. https://t.co/UZdJTPj3VW

Posted on
by

We have a lot of side responsibilities at the small NFP I work for. You know when you’re the only person that is good at doing something so you do it even if it’s not technically your job? That kind of thing.

I do a lot of the maintenance and “fiddling” with our WordPress website. I quite like it. Recently I have hit upon an extremely therapeutic activity: managed 404s.

We have a plugin to manage redirections for missing pages. I don’t exactly want to get to zero 404s but I do want to catch and redirect those I can to meaningful places. Even if it is a 410 response.

The really fun part is the plugin supports regular expressions. When I first started working with the plugin my efforts were limited to basic wildcard matches. Now I have even started with optional groups and substitutions. I’m by no means an expert but it is a great learning enviroment.

Today I have come up with a solution I am quite proud of. For some reason, our developer set the versions on our CSS and JS files to randomise occasionally. I assume this is for some sort of caching purposes. Anyway, this can generate some harmless 404s that I don’t want to be logged.

Using the regular expression 101 website I created this solution. Not much point explaining it here as the site does that very well. Any 404 that matches this pattern is excluded from the 404 logs, which helps me spot meaningful 404s much quicker.

Very pleased

Posted on
by
Classy PHP stock image

Today I wrote my first PHP code for deployment. I’m super proud!  I need to caveat that, though.

When I say “wrote” I mean I found some code online that did half of what I wanted to do. Then I found some code that did the other half of what I wanted to do. Then I put them together. Then I looked at existing code to see how my code needed to work. Once that was working, I adapted it to include a feature that no-one else seemed to have thought of. And, of course, I tested it all in production.

What is it? Just a few lines to add images to an RSS feed generated by WordPress. Already implemented by many a plugin but I like do some things my own way.

You can prove how poor Twitter recommendation algorithms are by following a Linux distribution. It will suggest you follow others… as if, right?

Sign-in now: do you want to stay signed in?
Sign-in GDPR: Do you want to stay signed in? If you agree we will need to place a cookie on your machine. A cookie is personal information. Personal information is defined in the #GDPR as… #informedconsent

Today I wasted about two hours trying to layout a responsive page using the classes from the wrong version of Bootstrap ?