"The GDPR aims primarily to give control to citizens and residents over their personal data and to simplify the regulatory environment for international business by unifying the regulation within the EU."The main effect of the law that I've seen is that many web sites now have warnings that they are using cookies, and you have to accept the warning to make it disappear.
Unfortunately, the GNUBG project decided that their best response to the new EU law was to temporarily shut down the site. Achim, one of the heads of the project, provided more details in a forum post that I pasted below. I certainly don't blame him or anyone for being afraid of potential consequences. Its just sad to see such a great program that took so many people so much work be almost inaccessible.
UPDATE: The good news is that it is still accessible! Its just a harder to navigate website. This link has now been posted on their home page:
https://www.gnu.org/software/gnubg/
On that page, the suggested last stable Windows build is
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnubg/gnubg-1_06_002-20180802-setup.exe
[OBSOLETE:
A response to Achim's post from Philippe Michel pointed out that a download page for Windows is still online. That page is here:
http://files.gnubg.org/media/windows/
And the more general media/download page here:
http://files.gnubg.org/media/
]
Post from Achim:
The situation is as follows:
We have a new GDPR (in Germany called DSGVO) adopted by the EU nearly two years ago, by Germany around one year ago, also a new Bundesdatenschutzgesetz. This law forces everybody saving and/or processing any kind of personal data to fulfil certain conditions starting with an understandable declaration about how and why data is preserved, processed, transferred and protected. This is valid for everybody apart from real personal web pages (family and cat pictures ;-) ).
It concerns e.g. web page stats (ip-addressess), comments on articles (nick name, email address), even plugins from Wordpress or other CMS are concerned (google fonts, spam filters and so on). This law was actually adopted to protect users and customers from big companies like facebook. Unfortunately the German version of this EU law is squishy and vague at many points. Right now many bloggers, clubs, freelance, small companies, and NGOs are unsure and frightened in Germany.
The situation here for gnubg.org is
1) Lawyers tend to categorise open source projects as non personal (fortunately we never allowed commercial banners or affiliates at gnubg.org).
2) The server is hosted in Germany, I’m responsible but don’t know yet whether a declaration should be written in German or English language. I also have no idea about the details of the CMS nucleus regarding the new law.
3) Government authorities can impose fines when someone impinges against this law (something I’m not so afraid of)
4) Here in Germany there is another pretty ugly law (Gesetz gegen den unlauteren Wettbewerb) which allows lawyers to write warnings combined with a fee when they notice a violation of the law. This already happened at the 25th of May in some cases and will definitely happen more often in future. Though gnubg is kind of a hobby project without any earning there are countless commercial competitors at the game market. I see some danger in this and don’t want to be the one being fined first. Google for »Abmahnanwalt« or Abmahnindustrie« and you know what I mean.
So I decided to put the page temporarily offline until you (all the programmers) decide what to do.
It’s actually much more complicated, but I’m lacking of time a little bit right now.
Ciao
Achim
