magnalox is now history

After reading 15 of the 119 pages of the GDPR, I decided, it's time to give up. I've visited many websites, but nobody seems to really know what will be right and what will be wrong. Things are vague, courts will have a lot of work.

I've spend hundreds of spare hours and more than a thousand of personal € in over 18 years on magnalox. Additionally, Google now changes the map API and wants all users to provide a credit-card to be charged, if the traffic exceeds a certain limit.

With a heavy heart I deleted all recordings. No data was processed or sold in any way.

In ~2000 it started with the then rather ambitious idea of recording and plotting personal GPS tracks on satellite images, displayed on a webpage. After a NASA admin allowed me to use their freely available satellite imagery, I simply started coding and publishing. And it worked. More and more ideas, like storytelling based on GPS tracks, followed. Many, sometimes outright enthusiastic users signed up.

Magnalox never made enough money to pay it's bills. New, more modern and better sites with similar ideas came up. Google started to offer brilliant mapping services. I decided not to spend more spare time on developing magnalox further, but kept it open.

The free, creative, sometimes even a bit anarchic era of the internet is now history. States, regulations, enterprises and lawyers took over. Every minute shady people tried to find magnalox' weak points. The fun has gone.

My thanks go to the early magnalox users for their support. I learned a lot, got in contact with a lot of interesting people and I'm grateful for having been a tiny tiny part of the exciting early days.

Volker

May 23 2018

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