..:: 20 years StarinkWorld - a "brief" retrospection [7] ::..
The years to come were rather calm. Since 2014 the websites were protected against bots, (wannabe) hackers and bad IP's, but nonetheless also in 2016 we still had lots of unwanted traffic and also attempts on known security flaws. But these come to nothing as I still didn't implement a PHP based CMS. So, these attempts were and are annoying, but that's all. No risk in sight.Unfortunately the used measures against bots and other crap like this became more and more restrict which finally led to that lots of visitors had to prevail this barrier first. It was a third-party service/tool called "bot trap" and if the "bot trap" identified an IP as suspicious you had to solve a little arithmetic problem to prove that you are human. Bots can't do that. In the background I already worked on a better solution but this one was not to be established in 2017 anymore.
Finally in 2017 Ed celebrated his 65th birthday – now he officially went on pension (at least on paper).
As previously mentioned I was working on a better solution for the website's protection against bots, hackers and so on. In January 2018 I abandoned the services of "bot-trap" and implemented some honeypots as well as Jeff Starr’s 6G Firewall instead. That's a pretty handy tool by the way.
These two methods are not that restrictive as "bot-trap" and therefore visitors shouldn't encouter any problems to reach our websites.
Until now more than 500 IP's have been trapped in the honeypot and are locked-out from the StarinkWorld website.
Also in 2018 almost every webmaster in Europe was confronted with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which caused for many webmasters sleepless nights.
Also the StarinkWorld website wasn't exempt by those regulations and I had to made the relevant changes on the website/server. For example we insure that every visitor can use the entire website of StarinkWorld completely anonymously by a server-sided anonymization of the IP addresses. And we also don't use any cookies on our websites to protect your privacy.
A bit later a new verdict of the European Court of Justice even threatened the further existence of the Facebook groups. Luckily we could fend the shutdown of the Facebook groups.
As a final result of the GDPR we also decided to abandon our newsletter service after 18 years.
So, 2018 was mainly a year of dealing with legal matters.
