If you’re a shop owner, the good site and bad site examples are pretty good, while local trading standards offices advise on selling online.

If you’re a buyer, see my guide on How to Check Web Shops for Basic Security.

Why is it so bad? Do companies not understand the law? Do they not bother to check the law? Do they deliberately decide to ignore it? Don’t customers prefer law-abiding web shops, or are low prices attractive enough to overcome that?

“there’s a huge amount of potentially privacy-sensitive metadata in your typical JPEG as generated by your camera (including camera type, settings, date/time, maybe even GPS coordinates of your location, etc).”

Source: jhead – List and modify EXIF fields in JPEG photos [Uwe Hermann's blog]

Even worse, if you’ve been using images from your suppliers or the manufacturers without permission, the metadata can be a dead giveaway. You really shouldn’t be using them without permission anyway, though.

If you’re using your own photos, want to remove the camera data and you’re not comfortable using the command line, most graphics editors like GIMP allow you to edit or remove that extra information too (I think it’s on Save As… OK… Advanced Options and untick “Save EXIF data” in GIMP). It’s just a bit slower to convert lots of images with a GUI. (I’d usually do that sort of thing from the command line for TTLLP customers.)

One fringe benefit is that removing the thumbnails and EXIF makes the images a bit smaller, so they’re quicker to download!

It is also the start of British Food Fortnight. (Tip to total coverage cooperative.) There is an open day 11-3 at Thatchers Cider, near here in Sandford. (To get there from Worle by bike, leave through St Georges to Bourton, then Hewish, Puxton, Nye, over the Strawberry Line and you’ll arrive on Nye Road in Sandford – turn right for the cider. I’m not sure of the best way from Locking direction…)

Tomorrow is the second equinox and International Day of Peace. (Tip to New Internationalist cooperative.)

What are you doing this weekend?

Another unusual thing for a UK ISP is the excellent public position on the Phorm ad-snooper that I mentioned previously: We strongly oppose these practices, especially the loss of privacy [...] Phorm is not operating on our users’ lines and we have required and received assurances from our suppliers that this will remain the case.

Our Chief Executive Vivian Woodell gave an interview to the FT (accept the first two cookies, then block the rest, else you only get two paragraphs) which has a pretty good explanation of how the business side of the cooperative works. We’re recruiting for Line Rental (PSTN and ISDN) until the end of the year, including special offers like residential Unlimited Anytime Calls for £7.95 a month (normally £9.99) at the moment, as well as the great climate-neutral and ethical policies – if your landline contract renewal comes up, give it a look.

The Phone Co-op was ten years old in June, but there are still big challenges: I’d love to see a cooperative pay-as-you-go mobile phone service and the mobile contract offers still look a bit expensive to me (no bundled data on phones, £25 per month for a 3G data card). I’d also love to see support for some daring innovative solutions like customers owning their own tails (tails are the last link to their house, where most of the UK has a choice of one provider: BT), using that as a way to upgrade small towns and villages to fibre-optic, or offer resident-owned wifi.

Update: As if by magic, Ofcom has started a social web consultation about mobile phone services. Go comment.

• Bristol Knowledge Unconference: Friday 5th September 2008 *
• Tour of Britain, Burnham-on-Sea, Somerset, Tuesday 9th September – other UK locations 7-14 September, itv4 7pm highlights daily *
• NoseRub DevCamp, Cologne, 13.-14. September 2008
• BathCamp, Bath, Somerset, 13-14th September
• Bristol Anarchist Bookfair, St Werburgh’s Centre, Bristol, 13-14th September
• Software Freedom Day, Global, 20 September 2008
• Scripting Enabled, London, 19th and 20th September
• Listening to the Social Entrepreneur, London Docklands, 9 Oct 2008 *
• LinuxWorld, London Olympia, 23-25 Oct 2008 *
• enterprise week, UK, part of Global Entrepreneurship Week, 17-23 November
• Cooperatives-SW/RISE Trade Fair, Bristol, 1st December *

I’m pretty sure I’ll go to the *d ones – which others do you think I should go to? Will you be at any of these? Any comments to make on/to any of them? Any more to add to the list?

“Software in the Public Interest, Inc., will hold a public board of directors meeting on Wednesday, August 20, 2008, 19:00 UTC. [...] SPI meetings are held on the OFTC IRC network, irc.oftc.net, in #spi. [...] Agenda“

A couple of weeks ago, I asked why people do and don’t join SPI? The answers I got can be grouped into a few headings:-

Don’t know about SPI

“I admit that I was unaware of SPI. However seeing its age, a few familiar names on the board and also on the project list it looks like a solid organisation.”

“I too am unfamiliar with your organization”

“I guess I would be yet aother person who was not aware of this group.”

“Lack of awareness of SPI is probably the biggest hurdle. I too, was unaware of SPI. I am aware of the Linux Foundation and the FSF and others, but how does SPI differentiate itself and its goals from those organizations?”

Don’t know about joining

“The membership page on the SPI website is buried at the bottom of a secondary menu. One has to really go looking for it. And this definitely gives the impression that adding members is not a very high priority.”

“I’ve been looking a while for how to join, is not the first time, I did before and never found it until now”

Don’t see why to join

“Even as an open source software advocate, I have not joined SPI because my particular interest and focus is on Plone. The Plone Foundation handles largely the same functions that SPI does for smaller, independent groups.”

“Why, what’s in it for me? The betterment of mankind or bragging rights when a corporations steals all of my work and gets rich off of it.”

“If you are someone who is very interested FOSS (free and open source software) rights and licenses, you are probably more inclined to become a part of the FSF (Free Software Foundation) or the OSI (Open Source Initiative).”

I’d welcome any thoughts you have on how we should overcome these barriers, either in the comments here, or on IRC #spi – I think I should be there a bit before or after the meeting. I’ll try to summarise the best over the next Wednesday or two.

1. one webserver was reinstalled instead of the upgrade I was expecting,
2. another webserver was cracked and defaced (combination of two known security problems that we didn’t fix quickly enough, but that’s the server owner’s call really), and
3. my internet connection keeps going offline for about 20 seconds at a time, which is just enough to stall ssh and VoIP, but not enough to debug.

Hopefully that’s it for today because there are other tasks I want to do. If I’m a bit slow to reply, now you know why! Sorry to anyone who was expecting me to do something else today – I will get back to you as soon as possible.