Sperrobjekt Weblog

At the moment, a movement gains momentum in Germany that promotes extended user privacy, amongst other things by disabling the logging of IP addresses. This is partly due to a recent judgement pronounced by the Amtsgericht in Berlin that denies the German Federal Ministry of Justice the right to protocol any individual-related data about the visitors of their web site. Add to that the proposal of Minister of the Interior, Wolfgang Schäuble, to introduce a massive data retention legislation, and you know why, two weeks ago, about 15.000 people came together in Berlin to protest against the plans of politicians who, themselves, can hardly use a computer, but try to spread fear amongst the German population. Fear of a terrorist attack, that is.

Many individuals, groups, and parties are fighting back. One of them is the initiative Wir speichern nicht (We do not store) that asks webmasters and providers to abandon IP logging and/or anonymize their log files. They posted some tutorials on how to anonymize apache mod_removeip, WordPress, or MediaWiki (all in German, more here). While there are no instructions for Serendipity, Jens Ferner kindly provides us with directions of how to disable the logging of IP addresses of your visitors: Simply add

to the top of your serendipity_config.inc.php. Although I'm not sure if this covers all possible locations in the code (think of plugins e.g.), this is a first step. I disabled logging your IP for this blog, but I don't have access to the apache log files. Maybe this can be added to Serendipity either directly into the core or by way of a plugin.

Additional info in German (if anyone knows of good English tutorials or sites, please post those in the comments):Wiki des AK Vorrat, Infoseite, Wiki der Piraten-Partei, Pressemitteilung