I've published a minor update to my GDPR Privacy Policy.
This post explains what those changes are, and why I'm making them.
You can view the old privacy policy (Privacy Policy 20180525) in the archives, The new version is "Privacy Policy - 20210615"
This page serves as the GDPR Privacy Notice for www.bentasker.co.uk.
The controller of the data collected is Ben Tasker.
You have the right to object to processing, either by objecting to a specific mechanism as described below, or by Contacting Me. If you feel your objection has not been appropriately handled, or that the processing does not have a lawful basis, you also have the right to complain to a supervisory authority.
As an overall summary of the policy - I collect some data in order to run and improve the site, but will not share that data with third parties unless I'm legally compelled to do so
Where I'm performing a service for you (i.e. you're a customer rather than simply visiting the site), our contract will include sections as needed to cover any additional elements I may encounter whilst working for you.
The following data is processed/retained in order to comply with Legal Obligations - GDPR Section 6(1)(c)
If you purchase a product or service for me, then you will have been issued with an invoice containing some or all of the following personal data
A copy of your invoice will be filed with my Tax records, which in order to fulfil HMRC's requirements must be retained for up to 7 years.
Because this data must be available in order to comply with a legal obligation, the GDPR rights of erasure and objection cannot be exercised for this data.
The data is retained on isolated systems with very strong access controls, and will not routinely be passed to any third party. In the event of an audit by HMRC, however, the data may be provided to them when formally requested.
The following data is processed/retained based upon the Lawful Basis of GDPR Section 6(1)(f) - Legitimate Interests. In accordance with GDPR, all have been subjected to a Legitimate Interest Assessment (LIA) in order to balance your rights with the legitimate needs.
Firstly, to deal with the obvious: the term sparkler bomb is a bit of a misnomer, the burst isn't contained - there's no explosion, just a large woosh. There are, of course, ways to contain them and make a bang, but doing so is (frankly) twattish and far, far less fun (even before it goes wrong and puts you in A&E).
Secondly: this post is offered as a bit of fun, not as an instructable - if you're silly enough to try and recreate (or better) my mischief, then the consequences lie with you and you alone.
Anyway, moving on...
One of my earlier memories of being on the internet, was delight at finding pages talking about creating sparkler bombs. Pages much like this post (in fact, I'm all but certain that was one of them, I remember the humour and definitely remember the imagery).
Much like any obsession on the earlier web, I only had photos to go on (Youtube wouldn't be created, let alone mainstream, for years - even where videos were recorded, they were shared as framegrabs).
The photos, though, showed some fairly spectacular results:
That blue line is an artefact of the CCD in the camera the image was captured on (i.e. it's not really there), but it does nothing but add to the effect.
At the time, I couldn't possibly have built a sparkler bomb myself - being too young to buy the things was a surmountable obstacle, but not having the funds to buy them in the first place was not. And so, some things that should not have been forgotten were lost - at least for a time.
Actually, I have periodically thought about them - usually when handed a sparkler - but the thought's slipped from my mind well before being able to act on it.
Recently though, I had need for a couple of small sparklers (think of things you put on a cake), and had the rest of the pack left over. Being mini sparklers it was never going to be anything near as spectacular as the image above, but nowadays we do have an availability of cheap video cameras to watch things in slow-mo so I figured it'd still be interesting to try.
Nearly a decade ago, I self-published a couple of books on the Kindle store: Linux for Business People and A Linux Sysadmin's guide to mischief.
Since then, I'd largely forgotten about them, until sorting through some files today.
They're pretty outdated (and weren't that great back then), but I figured as they've served their original purpose, I'd make them freely available:
Both come from those happy, happy days before SystemD inserted itself onto our systems...
Cookies have been viewed as the enemy for quite some time, with the result that 3rd party cookies are (quite rightly) being treated with high levels of suspicion.
Unfortunately, the focus being on cookies rather than the tracking/profiling that they enable has left an opening for the unscrupulous to offer a cookie-less alternative.
Enter Google, who a while back announced they were building something called Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) into Chrome. The basic underlying idea of FLoC is that it assigns the browser a cohort ID - grouping it in with other browsers who have a similar browsing history.
The browser's history never leaves the browser, with the cohort ID being calculated locally (updating once per week, based on the previous week's browsing), websites can then query the browser for it's cohort ID (by calling document.interestCohort()) and serve appropriate ads based on the ID returned.
However, deeper inspection has shown that rather than solving privacy issues, FLoC simply presents new ones - in fact there's an obvious vector in the paragraph above - your cohort ID is the same across all sites you visit...
Plus, although I say new, some of these issues were highlighted in 2019 and remain unaddressed.
Multiple groups have identified that FLoC can be used in fingerprinting, for example:
There are many, many writeups on the issues with FLoC (many linked to from here) that do a better job of covering this that I can here.
To summarise, though, Google's only defence is to prevent a false dichotomy - they argue that FLoC is better for privacy than 3rd party cookie based tracking. This rather ignores that that tracking is being killed by browsers - we could instead opt for a world without either (not so secret option c).
(It occurs to me that publishing this on 1 Apr isn't the best move - rest assured this is genuine)
I've long felt uncomfortable with the privacy trade-offs of having advertising on my sites.
Shortly before GDPR came into effect, I wrote a post detailing how I was, once again, revisiting the decision of having ads on my site.
The decision then, as before, was that the ads were a necessary evil as the revenue they generate contributes something to the running costs of this site, helping keep over a decade's worth of work online.
Today, however, I'm changing that decision and removing Google's Adsense from all of my sites
A little while ago, I wrote some musings on Home Automation and made reference to our heating setup.
As it's had a bit of time (and some poor weather) to run and be improved upon, I thought it might be helpful/interesting to lay out a bit more detail on the setup I'm now using.
We got a NEST thermostat during an unexpected boiler replacement, unfortunately it's smart features didn't live up to expectations, trying to overcome that led me down the path that I'll describe in this post.
Not the most exciting news I'm sure, but I'm adding a "House stuff" blog category to my site.
I've been feeling a bit... meh... of late, partly because I've not had opportunity to write anything here in a while. Part of the reason for that is that I've been focused on various home improvements/tweaks, not all of which fit well into more tech related sections (though there is some overlap).
The aim of this category is to give me a cathartic outlet, even if I'm just reinsulating or building a door.
