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W3C is working on a charter for a Privacy Working Group
“The mission of the Privacy Working Group will be to improve privacy on the Web both by advising groups developing standards on how to avoid and mitigate privacy issues with Web technologies and by standardizing mechanisms that improve user privacy on the Web.” A formal AC Review is expected in August
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-new-work/2023Jul/0000.html

—@w3c

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Here’s a quote from a YouTube video I heard earlier today. ‘In the modern age of the internet, we live by the motto that if something is online, it stays there. But the truth is that our creations are bound, sooner or later, to be cast into obscurity and forgotten’. Truer words were never spoken, and that’s why, if you come across any you and/or others find valuable, I very strongly urge you to back it up and archive it anywhere you can, in as many places you can, be it OneDrive, Dropbox, the Internet Archive or your own website or file storage server. Let’s work together to fight #DataRot and preserve as much of our online creations and discoveries as we possibly can! #data #archival #backup #preservation #DataArchival #DataBackup #DataPreservation

—@seedy

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So, fun story. In the middle of ActivityPub’s standardization, the Social Web Working Group nearly got shut down because we couldn’t get the big corporate players to pay attention to us, and the W3C’s membership structure required paid membership participation.

We tried *desperately* to get Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc to look at us. They weren’t interested. What I heard was that they had written off the idea that decentralized social networks could exist or work by then.

Luckily, management agreed that the SocialWG’s work was interesting enough that we should continue. And later having seen what happened when big players entered a standards group… ActivityPub was probably a better spec for being written by people passionate about it instead.

But anyway. That’s all to say… it’s so *weird* now to be in the present moment, as you can imagine…

—@cwebber

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It turns out that the guy who had been contracted for the accounting software integration had modified the active theme to include an obscure and weird PHP class that syncs the available products/SKUs with the accounting software.

This was a heavy task and took about a minute to run manually and was triggered by a request to index.php, using a specific GET parameter.

—@alda

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I didn’t find anything in the list of cron jobs on that machine and WordPress did not have a plugin or a wp-cron job that indicated anything happening every 3 hours.

The guy also rambled something about our machines being seriously underprovisioned, so we allocated more memory and CPU cores for this and while it did recover quicker, it still crashed regardless of havin 16 GB of memory and 4 cores.

And it was index.php of all things that was blowing everything up every 3 hours on the hour.

—@alda

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So I started monitoring things — and yes, it the server crashed every 3 hours as exponential amounts of memory were being reserved until the machine crashes.

I had a hard time isolating the issue as it seemed to stem from index.php (which is unusual), so I did the usual thing and cleaned out some large-ish values from the wp-options table and installed memcached.

Then I contacted the guy who had done this accounting software integration, who rambled something about a cron job.

—@alda

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An issue that I ran into last week:

A business sought me out because of an issue with a #WordPress site they were running. The server got overloaded and crashed every 3 hours for half an hour at a time and it was important to get to the bottom of this.

The hints that I got were that the site had been migrated to a new server in order to isolate it and that the issue started when someone was hired to integrate certain accounting software with it. 🧵

—@alda