Development
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.
I've been tracking some bad reviews in the JED for one of my more popular extensions. What I'm finding is very unfortunate, because there isn't much I can do about it other than beg people to stop. Apparently, people are creating non-forks of my extensions and then leaving them online to become stale, or are linking to the download destination of specific versions of my extensions. I don't know if this is malicious, or if they're just oblivious to the consequences of their actions. Of course, they would be oblivious - they aren't the ones feeling the consequences.