Development
As a developer who’s been writing software for Joomla for over a decade, I’ve had my share of proud moments. But recently, I stumbled across something that truly took me by surprise—and filled me with gratitude. While combing the web (as one does when checking on unresolved reputation quirks), I found my Authentication - Email plugin listed in the Git repo of none other than volunteers.joomla.org—a Joomla core site!
Eleven years ago, I stumbled across a technical paper from 2002 by Adam Back. It was about HashCash—a proof-of-work system designed to make spammers’ lives miserable by forcing their machines to grind through heavy calculations. I thought, “This could work for bot spam in Joomla forms,” and built my first Captcha - HashCash plugin. Little did I know, someone else had tried it before me—and their version vanished after landing on the CVE list in 2006. If I’d known, I might’ve picked a different name. But that’s ancient history, and my HashCash? It’s still kicking.
Because of my work described in Brain Games - SCORM/suspend_data and xAPI/state, I gained the attention of another company looking to divine some wisdom from data they had collected. It has been a number of years since I did this work, but I just got another email thanking me for my suspend data work and I thought this might be helpful to someone.
Remember Do Not Track? Neither do publishers. The little HTTP header that could—DNT for short—promised users a way to wave off trackers with a polite “no thanks.” It flopped hard. Websites ignored it, ad tech laughed it off, and by 2019, it was a digital relic. Enter Global Privacy Control (GPC), the shiny new signal touted as DNT’s successor. Backed by California’s privacy law, it’s supposed to force publishers to respect your opt-out. Sounds great, right? Here’s the catch: GPC has no more bite than DNT ever did. Publishers can sidestep it by simply doing business outside California’s reach—and they will. History says so - Google did it.
So I did a bunch of work I donated to a political candidate and (at the time) frequent media guest commentator, and this is a product of that work.
They've kept it quiet - but it happened. The Joomla core developers released Joomla! 4.0.0 Beta 1 - very very quietly. I only noticed because I was looking over the update XML file for the alpha 12 version - and there it was.
This may seem like a personal attack on the browser, but really, my hatred for IE has nothing to do with it. Maybe I get a little joy from this, but I'll try to keep that to myself.