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Saturday 21 June 2008
Where has the visitor map gone?
A housekeeping note. In the light of the Swedish plan to implement total surveillance of electronic communications in and out of their country, and a reminder that the Anglosphere has been doing exactly that for quite a while, and plans to beef it up further, Yokel has been sitting down to have a think.
What started to worry him was the Visitor Map, the Translation Widget, and the Comments. For all of these things, the visitor is redicted to call information from another site. How much should they trust them? How much does Yokel trust them? The answer really ought to be "No further than he could throw them", or some such retort. Especially troubling was either of the free sites set up to log where visitors have come from - the visitor map. Both companies are London based, but these days, that is not a recommendation of trust! The translation firm is in Russia.
Either way, Yokel started to feel uncomfortable about automatically exposing his visitors to such vulnerabilities. So they have gone. There is still a link to the online translation service. Yokel has found this firm to provide some of the better automatic translations around. But again, it is for the visitor to make his/her own decision on that score, not for Yokel to make an entry on their server logs an essential requirement of a visit to his blog.
Given the blogging software that Yokel is using, he has not yet worked out how to replace Haloscan for the comments. So they remain at present, but Yokel hopes their days are numbered, and he can then declare this blog to be Java free. Please let him know about any alternatives that you have seen.
