GDPR - May 2018

If you don't know what the General Data Protection Regulation is right now, you soon will. The EU Data Protection Directive has been around since 1995 but it is only a directive and not a regulation**. The bit that I can see see causing issues is the "right to be forgotten". So if you have data on social media I am guessing those companies will have to just delete you if that is what you want. It kicks in from May this year but as it is an EU directive I reckon a lot of companies will think they can just ignore it with "Brexit" kicking in but if you want to have any dealings with Europe, probably worth following it.

**Regulations have binding legal force throughout every Member State and enter into force on a set date in all the Member States. Directives lay down certain results that must be achieved but each Member State is free to decide how to transpose directives into national laws.

https://www.eugdpr.org/eugdpr.org.html

This from the Wikipedia page for the "Right to be forgotten"

"In 1995, the European Union adopted the European Data Protection Directive (Directive 95/46/EC) to regulate the processing of personal data.[9] This is now considered a component of human rights law.[10] The new European Proposal for General Data Protection Regulation provides protection and exemption for companies listed as "media" companies, like newspapers and other journalistic work. However, Google purposely opted out of being classified as a "media" company and so is not protected. Judges in the European Union ruled that because the international corporation, Google, is a collector and processor of data it should be classified as a "data controller" under the meaning of the EU data protection directive. These "data controllers" are required under EU law to remove data that is "inadequate, irrelevant, or no longer relevant", making this directive of global importance.[7]"

International Women's Day

Sorry this is a few days late but thought I would share this. Apologies for the shocking English - nothing to do with me. Joking aside, anything that helps to address gender pay differences and domestic abuse etc can't be a bad idea. Sure somebody will come up with something as funny in November for International Men's Day.

Samba

I have recently been moving a lot of data between Windows and Linux. As much as WinScp is an excellent way of doing that, it is not the only way. Samba allows the mapping of the Unix filesystems into file explorer so they look just like any other windows drive.

https://www.samba.org/

Now I don't want this site just to repeat stuff from other sites so I will point you in the right direction and point out any problems.

http://www.tomsitpro.com/articles/linux-server-configuration-guide-book-excerpt,2-777-2.html

After installing samba you will end up with a /etc/samba directory with a smbusers file. Now it may be tempting just to edit that file but you should use :

smbpasswd -a <username>

Once you have mapped a drive test it out. There are loads of other ways to get Windows / Unix to share drives but I like Samba as you can give access to individuals or groups and because it has been around for ages is stable and for a lot of sites it is free too.