January 25, 2022
In the last few weeks, there has been a lot of talking about Google Analytics and the GDPR.
I think most of the comments around it have missed the whole picture.
A little bit of history
Our brief history begins at the end of the ’90s when the EU and the US agreed on the International Safe Harbor Privacy Principles. On the 26th July 2000, the European Commission (EC) formalized it with the Commission Decision 2000/520/EC, where it was defined that data could be freely moved from the EU to the US.
The assumption was that the data on US soil would have comparable (or better) protection than the same data on EU soil, and therefore the privacy of European citizens was not at risk.
On 6th October 2015, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) invalidated this decision on the basis that in the US laws were authorizing public authorities to have access on a generalized basis to the content of electronic communications, and this was deemed to be “compromising the essence of the fundamental right to respect for private life” (the quote is from the ECJ decision).
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January 10, 2022
The CNIL, France’s data regulator, fined Meta (Facebook) and Google for violating the GDPR for a total of 210M€.
More specifically:
- Google LLC (USA) got fined 90M€
- Google Ireland Limited got fined 60M€
- Facebook Ireland Limited got fined 60M€
Also, if the companies will not fix the issue within three months, an additional penalty of 100'000€/day will be added.
There are two facts that I think are very interesting about these fines:
the reason behind the fines
the fines issuer
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December 31, 2021
In December 2020, the CentOS Project announced a series of changes.
The three most important are:
- the creation of CentOS Stream and the consequent rename of CentOS (the classic Linux distribution the project is known for) in CentOS Linux
- the anticipation to today (31/12/2021) of the End Of Life for CentOS Linux 8
- the fact that CentOS Linux 8 is going to be the last and that from now on, only CentOS Stream will have new releases
That announcement created a lot of different sentiments in the community and even more among the CentOS Linux users.
As many predicted, multiple solutions are now available for the users that used to be on CentOS Linux.
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November 26, 2021
In the last few weeks, I’ve heard from many - mainly not technical - people the expression “Web3”.
In a way, it is excellent that people that are not tech-savvy start to learn about the Web, how it works, and where it might go, since they are using it consciously or not to perform the majority of tasks in their lives.
The issue I have with this, though, is that no one of them could explain how it would work or why they are so confident that the future is going in that direction.
The only thing they could associate with Web3 was that cryptocurrencies would be the future, and their value would go to the moon.
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October 31, 2021
I often see people and companies moving their workloads to the cloud.
Speaking with them, they explain that the cloud is cheaper, more flexible, and more reliable than their current infrastructure.
To further increase investment return, they often target a specific (single) cloud to reduce management costs and complexity.
By itself, this trend seems a very reasonable one.
The risk is that, sometimes, people do not consider the less immediate risks around this move.
There are many of those risks, and if there is an appetite for it, I’ll be talking further about the other dangers, but now I would like to focus on a specific one: the risk of a shutdown.
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September 20, 2021
After having renewed the Google Associate Cloud Engineer certification, it was the moment to renew the Google Professional Cloud Architect certification as well.
Since I wanted to keep Windows on my laptop for the smallest amount of time possible, I decided to book the Professional Cloud Architect exam the day after the Associate Cloud Engineer one.
On the exam day (18th of August), having had experience the previous day, I ensured to set up everything correctly.
As I did the previous day, I decided to use my Lenovo Bluetooth Laser Mouse.
The exam started without any hiccups at 15:00.
At around 15:30, I moved the mouse wheel to the left, triggering a “back” signal, equivalent to press the “back” button in a browser.
Kryterion Sentinel decided that the proper way to handle such a signal was to interrupt the exam.
I tried to call the Kriterion call centers, but a recorded voice informed me that the fastest way to access their customer care was via chat.
I opened a chat with their support and got put in a queue of about 20 people.
After 40 minutes, I managed to chat with a support representative, and they managed to schedule a new exam session for me a couple of minutes later (16:15).
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August 25, 2021
A couple of years ago, I obtained the Google Associate Cloud Engineer certification, so it was re-certification time.
Since it is August and probably also due to the whole ongoing health situation, I’ve not found any test center at a reasonable distance.
Therefore, I’ve decided to use the Online Proctored option.
Google relies on Kryterion for their exams, as many other companies do, since Kryterion has more than 1100 associated test centers and, at least in the ICT certification space, it’s one of the most commonly used networks.
Having had experience with Red Hat remote certifications, I was expecting at least the same level of user experience with Kryterion.
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July 28, 2021
A few years ago, I wrote a blog post on managing CORS headers with Negroni.
Lately, I’ve created a new API server that needed to be accessible from the browser, but this time I used a different technology, more precisely gRPC-Gateway.
Few months after I wrote that blog post, I stopped writing new REST services by hand.
I did not rewrite all the services that used the old paradigm just because they needed a fix or a new feature, but for all new services, I moved to gRPC with gRPC-Gateway.
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June 28, 2021
Few months ago I posted a library for sensible int scale for Gonum Plot.
There is a similar package I’ve developed to handle timescales.
The integer one, being based on a recursive function, works with any number scale.
Differently, this one will only work well with a timescale between 2 days and a couple of years.
Extending it is not hard since it’s enough to add additional case statements in the switch, but I’ve not found use-cases for different timeframes so far.
If you add additional options, please commit them back!
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May 31, 2021
Three years passed from the moment the GDPR become binding law in the European Union.
On the one hand, I’m happy that it has already been three years, but on the other hand, I’m impatient to see GDPR fully applied.
Cookies
Cookies are always a hot theme when we talk about GDPR.
I still see websites handing out cookies (first and third parties ones) without a cookie banner or to users who have not pressed the “accept” button on the cookie banner.
Also, speaking about cookie banners, the majority are not compliant since they often make it hard to refuse cookies or pre-select cookie acceptance.
This situation is unfortunate, but we see some movement on this (like the noyb initiative).
If those initiatives continue, as I hope, next year, the cookie situation will be much better!
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(Fabio Alessandro Locati|Fale)'s blog