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451: Unavailable due to legal reasons We recognize you are attempting to access this website from a country belonging to the European Economic Area (EEA) inclu

by fergie 8y ago

451: Unavailable due to legal reasons We recognize you are attempting to access this website from a country belonging to the European Economic Area (EEA) including the EU which enforces the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and therefore access cannot be granted at this time. For any issues, contact hostmaster@madison.com or call 800-362-8333.

raverbashing 8y ago
Maybe someone should do an extension to rename those "errors" "Unavailable due to failure to understand the rules" or "Unavailable because abusing our visitors information is forbidden"
- Buge 8y ago
  It costs money to hire lawyers to understand the laws and ensure compliance. Maybe they ran the numbers and it wasn't worth it to hire the lawyers.
  - atoav 8y ago
    If you don’t collect too much data beeing GDPR compliant is not hard at all. If you don’t know what data you collect becausae of all that reliance on third part extensions or if you heavily collect data and don’t want to break the law, this gets a harder topic. Beeing an European it was quite interesting to see how little many web developers know about their dependencies and extensions. Most I know thought they can solve GDPR problems by install yet another wordpress addon they didn’t program.
    - TomMarius 8y ago
      You shouldn't bellitle them. A person doing a small business should not be required to understand GDPR nor technicalities of WP plugins. We should strive for simple to understand policies and technologies, just as the others are trying e.g. to make better furniture for us IT people. Making a website absolutely should not require computer science and law degrees.
      - raverbashing 8y ago
        I agree with you (there is probably a couple WP plugins that do the blocking). Though there are a lot of issues that even a small WP site is subject to (security, IP laws, etc)
      - tjoff 8y ago
        Yes they should. Because GDPR arose from blatant misuse and abuse. > Making a website absolutely should not require computer science and law degrees. Making a website absolutely should not require that you track your users and are careless with your users personal information. Thank you GDPR for trying to be the common sense the internet needs.
        TomMarius 8y ago
        If it is the only way to make money with said website, then we need to provide better technologies before we demand such things (after we've been perfectly okay with it for the past 15 years) - we might easily destroy livelihood of many people. Not a nice thing to do.
        tjoff 8y ago
        We haven't been okay with it. Blatant abuse is not a nice thing to do and ethically and morally wrong. Society shouldn't be nice toward people that try to exploit others for personal gain. We wouldn't need GDPR if people had a shred of decency.
      - atoav 8y ago
        I don’t. I have to work with these very people ever so often and I understand how hard it must to navigate in that environment. However if you are professionally building and selling websites in the EU you probably should be aware of the consequences and side effects your decisions have. Many (small business) webpages have no real need for cookies, cross site tracking, etc — they are probably better off with a fast static website than some sort of dynamic complexity monster. If you apply the principles of form follows function and data economy here you should get blazingly fast sites without third party trackers and any need for cookies and therefore automatically comply with the GDPR and have no need to display a notice which is another plus. The reason why it is not that way, is because that professional who used wordpress with a ton of addons for the past decade, doesn’t understand how his decisions tie into it. They don’t understand that it is possible to build websites that won’t collect personal user data, because they don’t need to. They tell their clients they have to display these notices and they don’t tell them about the trade offs involved. I understand that, if you used a mostly free tool and you never really cared about the privacy of your clients visitor, the GDPR is yet another annoying issue on your list of annoying issues — but if you mislead your clients like that, you are either not informing yourself propperly or you are misleading them willingly. The educational environment surely is to blame for that too. Sure here is how easy you can include that facebook like button — but we won’t tell you about the consequences for the privacy of your users. Just use google analytics or google fonts or that captcha no worries, it is just a cool thing to include, everybody does it so it can’t be wrong.
  - burlesona 8y ago
    Agreed. It’s a local newspaper in Wisconsin. They probably don’t have a single programmer on staff and get consulting ad hoc to fix issues with their Wordpress installation or whatever. I suspect they asked “what’s the cheapest way for us not get sued for GDPR?” the consultant asked “what percentage of your readers are in Europe?”, and when they relied “approximately zero,” the consultant said “I can just block those IPs for a hundred bucks.” Much easier than trying to understand what “tracking cookies” are when you don’t even understand what a web server is.
  - raverbashing 8y ago
    Did they ran the numbers on the amount of visitors from the EU they have? Here's your GDPR compliance for sites that don't take your name or other data directly: don't store the full ip address and don't track the user.
hansflying 8y ago
I hope more companies will just block EU countries. EU think they are the center of the universe and they can dictate their laws to every other country (ex. GDPR). Now, the bureaucratic hell start to shoot back and German GDP growth dropped to miserly 0.3% PA and this will only get worse, because in Europe you spend 95% of your time on taxation and law compliance and only 5% on the actual product development => extremely low productivity.
chrischen 8y ago
I don't get the sites who expend resources and effort to implement this, but not actually implement GDPR compliance. You're either under jurisdiction or not, but this half-implementation is extremely odd.
- rat9988 8y ago
  It's not a half implementation. They just don't want to comply so they restrict access from this geographic area.

by fergie 8y ago

raverbashing 8y ago

Maybe someone should do an extension to rename those "errors" "Unavailable due to failure to understand the rules" or "Unavailable because abusing our visitors information is forbidden"

Buge 8y ago
It costs money to hire lawyers to understand the laws and ensure compliance. Maybe they ran the numbers and it wasn't worth it to hire the lawyers.
- atoav 8y ago
  If you don’t collect too much data beeing GDPR compliant is not hard at all. If you don’t know what data you collect becausae of all that reliance on third part extensions or if you heavily collect data and don’t want to break the law, this gets a harder topic. Beeing an European it was quite interesting to see how little many web developers know about their dependencies and extensions. Most I know thought they can solve GDPR problems by install yet another wordpress addon they didn’t program.
  - TomMarius 8y ago
    You shouldn't bellitle them. A person doing a small business should not be required to understand GDPR nor technicalities of WP plugins. We should strive for simple to understand policies and technologies, just as the others are trying e.g. to make better furniture for us IT people. Making a website absolutely should not require computer science and law degrees.
    - raverbashing 8y ago
      I agree with you (there is probably a couple WP plugins that do the blocking). Though there are a lot of issues that even a small WP site is subject to (security, IP laws, etc)
    - tjoff 8y ago
      Yes they should. Because GDPR arose from blatant misuse and abuse. > Making a website absolutely should not require computer science and law degrees. Making a website absolutely should not require that you track your users and are careless with your users personal information. Thank you GDPR for trying to be the common sense the internet needs.
      - TomMarius 8y ago
        If it is the only way to make money with said website, then we need to provide better technologies before we demand such things (after we've been perfectly okay with it for the past 15 years) - we might easily destroy livelihood of many people. Not a nice thing to do.
        tjoff 8y ago
        We haven't been okay with it. Blatant abuse is not a nice thing to do and ethically and morally wrong. Society shouldn't be nice toward people that try to exploit others for personal gain. We wouldn't need GDPR if people had a shred of decency.
    - atoav 8y ago
      I don’t. I have to work with these very people ever so often and I understand how hard it must to navigate in that environment. However if you are professionally building and selling websites in the EU you probably should be aware of the consequences and side effects your decisions have. Many (small business) webpages have no real need for cookies, cross site tracking, etc — they are probably better off with a fast static website than some sort of dynamic complexity monster. If you apply the principles of form follows function and data economy here you should get blazingly fast sites without third party trackers and any need for cookies and therefore automatically comply with the GDPR and have no need to display a notice which is another plus. The reason why it is not that way, is because that professional who used wordpress with a ton of addons for the past decade, doesn’t understand how his decisions tie into it. They don’t understand that it is possible to build websites that won’t collect personal user data, because they don’t need to. They tell their clients they have to display these notices and they don’t tell them about the trade offs involved. I understand that, if you used a mostly free tool and you never really cared about the privacy of your clients visitor, the GDPR is yet another annoying issue on your list of annoying issues — but if you mislead your clients like that, you are either not informing yourself propperly or you are misleading them willingly. The educational environment surely is to blame for that too. Sure here is how easy you can include that facebook like button — but we won’t tell you about the consequences for the privacy of your users. Just use google analytics or google fonts or that captcha no worries, it is just a cool thing to include, everybody does it so it can’t be wrong.
- burlesona 8y ago
  Agreed. It’s a local newspaper in Wisconsin. They probably don’t have a single programmer on staff and get consulting ad hoc to fix issues with their Wordpress installation or whatever. I suspect they asked “what’s the cheapest way for us not get sued for GDPR?” the consultant asked “what percentage of your readers are in Europe?”, and when they relied “approximately zero,” the consultant said “I can just block those IPs for a hundred bucks.” Much easier than trying to understand what “tracking cookies” are when you don’t even understand what a web server is.
- raverbashing 8y ago
  Did they ran the numbers on the amount of visitors from the EU they have? Here's your GDPR compliance for sites that don't take your name or other data directly: don't store the full ip address and don't track the user.

hansflying 8y ago

I hope more companies will just block EU countries. EU think they are the center of the universe and they can dictate their laws to every other country (ex. GDPR). Now, the bureaucratic hell start to shoot back and German GDP growth dropped to miserly 0.3% PA and this will only get worse, because in Europe you spend 95% of your time on taxation and law compliance and only 5% on the actual product development => extremely low productivity.

chrischen 8y ago

I don't get the sites who expend resources and effort to implement this, but not actually implement GDPR compliance. You're either under jurisdiction or not, but this half-implementation is extremely odd.

rat9988 8y ago
It's not a half implementation. They just don't want to comply so they restrict access from this geographic area.