Microsoft accounts and GDPR

The UK / EU GDPR (General Data Protection Regulations) state that in the Information commissioners office website [1] upon request of data removal, data should be deleted within “An organisation has one calendar month “. [2] So why is it that upon recently deleting an old hotmail e-mail. it takes 60 days as per quote from their website.

To protect your account from accidentally being closed, we may ask you to prove your identity and intent. For example, if you forgot your account info and had to reset your security info, you must wait 60 days before closing your account. 


You can reopen this account, preventing the closure, by signing back in within 60 days. To reopen, you'll need to prove your identity using your current account security information.

This account becomes unrecoverable 60 days after you've closed the account, meaning that you'll be unable to reopen it.

Quote from website regarding time for data deletion.

One of the rather pathetic excuses seems to be that you may request this in error. To me this is just patronising. People are not stupid, big or small tech is not above the law, even though they seem to think that most of the time. Just delete the data within 30 days.

If I request my account is deleted from the Fediverse it gets deleted. Same goes for Gitlab repositories.

Another reason to avoid big tech. If you need e-mail, pads, collaborative editing and storage, then Disroot [3] is excellent as a service too.

REFERENCES

1 ICO 2 Your rights to get your data deleted 3. Disoot

TAGS

#YearOfTheFediverse,#GDPR,#data,#removal,#ico,#account,#deletion.

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Periodic table of data

I found a link to this on Twitter, part of last weeks National Periodic table day. This is a really useful set of periodic tables, each one covers a different topic, e.g Origins, name origins, elements in the Sea, Phones, Toxicity etc.

• Element Data

So an example is:– Periodic table of Isotopes, which gives information on how many isotopes there are for each element.

REFERENCES

• Compound Chemistry

TAGS

#YearOfTheFediverse,#Chemistry,#PeriodicTable,#Elements,#isotopes,#CompoundChem,#Chemical,#Data

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Astronify testing

Back in 2020 I attended a Space Telescope Science Institute lecture on Astronify and wrote a review on this.

I an going to attempt to test the software out, so the first task is to install python-pip

May as well install this for both python and python3

apt install python-pip python-pip-whl python3-pip python3-pipdeptree

pip install astronify
Collecting astronify
  Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement astronify (from versions: )
No matching distribution found for astronify

Astronify is on pypy so it makes sense to perhaps do a apt search on this:-

I found the following package

pypi2deb

apt install pypi2deb has quite a few extra requirements so may take a while

man page for pip also points to

pip search

so tried to do a search for astronify but the package seems to crash,

pip search astronify
Exception:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pip/_internal/cli/base_command.py", line 143, in main
    status = self.run(options, args)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pip/_internal/commands/search.py", line 48, in run
    pypi_hits = self.search(query, options)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pip/_internal/commands/search.py", line 65, in search
    hits = pypi.search({'name': query, 'summary': query}, 'or')
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/xmlrpclib.py", line 1243, in __call__
    return self.__send(self.__name, args)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/xmlrpclib.py", line 1602, in __request
    verbose=self.__verbose
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pip/_internal/download.py", line 791, in request
    return self.parse_response(response.raw)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/xmlrpclib.py", line 1493, in parse_response
    return u.close()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/xmlrpclib.py", line 800, in close
    raise Fault(**self._stack[0])
Fault: <Fault -32500: "RuntimeError: PyPI's XMLRPC API has been temporarily disabled due to unmanageable load and will be deprecated in the near future. See https://status.python.org/ for more information.">

So at first glance this may not seem useful, the error is more useful to anyone who understands it. Next step would be to ask on some forums for help.

REFERENCES

• STSCI
• Astronify Website
• The Open University
• Space Telescope
• ESA Hubble
• Qoto Mastodon
• Qoto discourse

TAGS

#YearOfTheFediverse,#Astronify,#Astronony,#STSCI,#Data,#Sonification,#ESA,#Hubble,#Research

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Astronify follow up

Back in 2020 I attended a Space Telescope Science Institute lecture on Astronify and wrote a review on this.

I found this as a result of another post on Mastodon earlier today from Khurram Wadee. This is the sonification of the Pillars of creation, within the Eagle Nebula. This nicely illustrates how the research of the Astronify team works.

There is also a video about this nebula here which is interesting.

I have included some related links below, including a link to the Qoto Mastodon instance, and the related Discourse forum where you can discuss a range of STEM topics.

Lots of research going on, which is really exciting. If you want to learn more, the Open University offer courses within the Space Sciences.

REFERENCES

• STSCI
• Astronify Website
• The Open University
• Space Telescope
• ESA Hubble
• Qoto Mastodon
• Qoto discourse

TAGS

#YearOfTheFediverse,#Astronify,#Astronony,#STSCI,#Data,#Sonification,#TheOpenUniversity,#ESA,#Hubble,#Research

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

Safer Internet Day 2021

Tuesday 9th Feb 2021

Safer Internet Day 2021

A few resources that have been shared on the Fediverse recently

The Digital Detox website [1] gives some useful information on how to protect your digital security, privacy and well being online.

Email self defense [2] covers encryption and how you can use techniques to both sign and encrypt email.

The Free Software Foundation : India [4] have produced a nice guide on different messaging apps. I made a post on this a while back.

Of course a good way to stay safe and private is to also use the privacy respecting search engines such as duckduckgo [5] and perhaps install browser extensions such as libreJS [6]

Supporting and following what people such the Electronic Frontier Foundation [7] as the Small Technology Foundation [8] and the Solid Project [9] also a good idea, see what is happening and how these project can give the end user, true control of their data.

Choose better software and hardware, that supports user freedom. Devices such as the PineBook / Phone [10] could really put power back in your hands.

REFERENCES

1 Data Detox Kit * Five steps to reduce your digital footprint * SmartPhone Data * Privacy Search 2 Email Self Defense 3 Free Software Foundation 4 Free Software Foundation : India 5 Duckduckgo 6 LibreJS 7 Electronic Frontier Foundation * EFF – Mastodon 8 Small Technology Foundation * Aral Balkan * Laura Kalbag 9 Solid Project 10 Pinebook / Phone

TAGS

#YearOfTheFediverse,#Data,#Privacy,#Security,#Detox

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Open Street Map

OpenStreetMap is a map of the world, created by people like you and free to use under an open licence.

Open Street Map is a great project that anyone can get involved with, using open data so mapping data can be used freely in accordance with the terms on the website.

Embedded maps are also interactive

View Larger Map

I am in the process of finding local attractions, business etc and adding links to their websites. This hopefully helps with promotion and helps the website develop generally.

Links

• OSM on Mastodon
• OSM on Twitter

#openstreetmap,#data,#mapping,#open,#project

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Remote education

With the current Covd19 crisis in the UK, getting worse (again), Areas entering tier 4, (highest lockdown), Schools are closing and in some cases using remote education.

This brings up the prospect of them using non free tools, that when it comes to privacy may not be as private as first thought.

There is a really good article here on the GNU website, that explains the problem.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation have an event coming up on privacy on campus

It would be great if there could now be a big push to promote free and open source tools, to help level up education, and actually safeguard children, young people and adults from data harvesting etc.

So what, free, open source and privacy / rights respecting remote tools can we use for teaching?

• https://meet.jit.si/
• https://bigbluebutton.org/
• Moodle

I am now involved in an effort to take the digital skills framework (UK) and look at how we can achieve this using free and open source software. This project can be found on Codeberg

#education,#privacy,#safeguarding,#data,#children, #youngpeople,#adults,#skills,#freesoftware,#dataprotection,#safeguarding,#freedom.

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Accessible Design for Users With Disabilities

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/accessible-design-for-users-with-disabilities/

#internet,#safety,#data,#detox,#removal,#privacy

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Astronify Review

Just watched the latest Space Telescope Science Institute lecture, mentioned in a blog post from 10/11/2020

The full lecture title was

Hearing The Light: How Sonification Deepens our Understanding of the Cosmos and Makes Astronomy More Accessible

This talk was really interesting, it covered how data from astronomy can be presented in an audible way, rather than as a graph on a screen or paper for example.

Why would this be important ?

Well, for most people, visual data can be seen by the eyes, if you are blind or partially sited, this this data is in accessible to you.

One of the examples given is the light curve from a star transit, this may look as follows

------             --------
      |            |
      |            |
      |            |                     
      --------------

So this, would illustrate, how the light from a star, drops when a planet passes in front of the host star.

If we were to express this audibly then the curve would start off as one tone then drop to a lower tone and go back up to the original higher tone.

This makes astronomy more accessible. It is also another way to represent data from Kepler and TESS telescopes.

The lecture explains this far better, but from the Q/A session we learn that this can be found in every day life.

The lecture emphasises that sonification is not about recording existing sound we could hear. So a microphone under water to record sound from sea life is NOT Sonification, however I think they suggested that turning non audible sound to audible sound IS an example, Other given examples, included star flares, which again can be represented. Once you know what to listen for, it helps us confirm the data further.

The team has a website at https://astronify.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ but I would recommend watching the video first.

#astronomy,#stsci,#data,#audio,#sonification,#presentation,#Astronify

ARDUINO SCIENCE JOURNAL

This looks great, really useful to be able to easily record results from science experiments.

A pocket-sized science lab that encourages students to explore how the world works, record data, document observations, and experiment like a real scientist.

• Arduino Science Journal

• Arduino LinkedIn

• Arduino Twitter

#arduino,#science,#hacking,#data,#observation,#experiments, #research.