2013-12-01 Anonymizing the Oddmuse log files

I’ve just implemented a new non-optional Oddmuse feature. I’m removing all hostnames and IP numbers of older log entries. The log entries older than 90 days are stored in a different log file in order to speed up the generation of Recent Changes. During maintenance, these log entries are copied from one file to the other and I’m now taking advantage of this copying to remove the hostname or IP number.

Basically I find that as a person, I dislike invasions of privacy and I feel that in some small form, software engineers are inviting it because often it’s easier to do. We often model things to never forget, e.g. version control.

One of the important pages on Meatball was ForgiveAndForget. Forgetting is human.

At the same time, with Snowden and the NSA, I feel that as a hoster I’m more comfortable if I cannot provide the logs an agency is looking for.

Furthermore, I’ve had a very small number of emails from users asking me to remove their hostnames from the log files because they had accidentally edited the wiki from work. Pages containing their hostname will eventually be deleted but log entries were not. Now they’re anonymized and people can feel safer knowing that the traces will eventually disappear again.

• The idea* is that you would only need hostnames or IP numbers to fight spam and vandalism: Add regular expressions matching either hostname or IP number of spammers or vandals to your list of banned hosts and prevent the attack from continuing. After a few days, however, this information is no longer required. In this day and age of privacy invasion, I think software should take a pro-active stance. The log entries must be anonymized.

The existing log file for the older entries is not changed. If you want to do the right thing, there’s a script called anonymize.pl in the contrib directory to do just that.

=> anonymize.pl

Just call it in your data directory. Example:

alex@psithyrus:~/oddmuse$ perl ~/src/oddmuse/contrib/anonymize.pl
Wrote anonymized 'oldrc.log'.
Saved a backup as 'oldrc.log~'

See Oddmuse:Upgrading Issues for a more technical explanation of what’s going on.

=> Oddmuse:Upgrading Issues

​#Oddmuse ​#Wikis ​#Privacy