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• Switch to Matomo for WordPress from Google Analytics

  10 mars 2020, par Joselyn Khor — Plugins, Privacy
  While Google Analytics may seem like a great plugin option on the WordPress directory, we’d like to present a new ethical alternative called Matomo for WordPress, which gives you 100% data ownership and privacy protection.

  Firstly what does Google Analytics offer in WordPress ?

  When you think of getting insights about visitors on your WordPress (WP) sites, the first thing that comes to mind might be Google Analytics. Why not right ? Especially when there are good free Google Analytics plugins, like Monster Insights and Site Kit. 

  These give you access to a great analytics platform, but the downside with Google Analytics is the lack of transparency around privacy and data ownership.

  

  Matomo Analytics for WordPress is an ethical alternative to Google Analytics for WordPress

  If you’re more interested in a privacy-respecting, GDPR compliant alternative, there’s now a new option on the WP plugins directory : Matomo Analytics – Ethical Stats. Powerful Insights. 

  It’s free and can be considered the #1 ethical alternative to Google Analytics in terms of features and capabilities. Why is it important to choose a web analytics platform that respects privacy ?

  

  Risk facing fines for non-GDPR compliance and privacy/data breaches

  In Europe there’s an overarching privacy law called GDPR which provides better privacy protection for EU citizens on the web. 

  Websites need to be GDPR compliant and follow rules governing how personal data is used or risk facing fines up to 4% of their yearly revenue for data/privacy breaches or non-compliance. Even if your website is based outside of Europe. If you have visitors from Europe, you can still be liable.

  

  In the US, there isn’t one main privacy law, there hundreds on both the federal and state levels to protect the personal data (or personally identifiable information) of US residents – like the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). There are also industry-specific statutes related to data privacy like HIPAA.

  To protect your website from coming under fire for privacy breaches, best practise is to find platforms that are privacy and GDPR compliant by design. 

  When you own your own data – as with the case of Matomo – you have control over where data is stored, what you’re doing with it, and can better protect the privacy of your visitors.

  At this point you may be asking, “what’s the point of an analytics platform if you have to follow all these rules ?”

  The importance of analytics for your WordPress site

  • Figuring out how your audience behaves to increase conversions
  • Setting, tracking and measuring conversion goals
  • Being able to find insights to improve and optimize your site 
  • Making smarter, data-driven decisions so your company can thrive, rather than risk being left behind

  Analytics is used to answer questions like :

  • Where are your website visitors coming from (location) ?
  • How many people visit your website ?
  • Which are the most popular pages on your site ?
  • What sources of traffic are coming to your site (social, marketing campaigns, search) ?
  • Is your marketing campaign performing better this month compared to last ?

  Matomo can answer all of the above questions. BONUS : On top of that, with Matomo you get the peace of mind knowing you’re the only one who has access to those answers.

  

  Matomo Analytics vs Google Analytics on WordPress

  The top 5 most useful features in Matomo Analytics that’s comparable to GA

  1. Campaign measurement – traffic. Matomo also has a URL builder that lets you track which campaigns are working effectively
  2. Tracking goals. Matomo empowers you to set goals you can track. Being able to see this means you can accurately measure your return on investment (ROI) 
  3. Audience reports to learn about visitors. Matomo’s powerful visitors feature lets you learn who is visiting your site, what their journey is and the steps they take to conversion.
  4. In depth view of behaviour with Funnels in Matomo. This tracks the journey of your visitors from the moment they enter your site, to when they leave. Giving you insight into where and why you lose your visitors.
  5. Custom reports. Where you create your unique reports to fit your business goals.

  Other benefits of using Matomo :

  • No data sampling which means you get 100% accurate reporting
  • 100% data ownership
  • Free Tag Manager
  • Search engine keyword rankings
  • Unlimited websites
  • Unlimited team members
  • GDPR manager
  • API access
  • Hosted on your own servers so you have full control over where your data is stored

  Learn more about the differences in this comprehensive table.

  

  Matomo Analytics for WordPress is free !

  Matomo Analytics is the best free Google Analytics alternative on the WordPress Directory. In addition to having comparable features where you can do pretty much do everything you wanted to do in GA. Matomo Analytics for WordPress makes for an ethical choice because you can respect your visitor’s privacy, can become GDPR compliant, and maintain control over your own data.

  Google Analytics leads the market for good reasons. It’s a great free tool for those who want analytics, but there’s no clarity when it comes to grey areas like privacy and data ownership. If these are major concerns for you, Matomo offers complete peace of mind that you’re doing the best you can to stay ethical while growing your business and website.

  It’s just as easy to install in a few click !

  Install and see for yourself !

• Parsing The Clue Chronicles

  30 décembre 2018, par Multimedia Mike — Game Hacking

  A long time ago, I procured a 1999 game called Clue Chronicles : Fatal Illusion, based on the classic board game Clue, a.k.a. Cluedo. At the time, I was big into collecting old, unloved PC games so that I could research obscure multimedia formats.

  
  
  

  Surveying the 3 CD-ROMs contained in the box packaging revealed only Smacker (SMK) videos for full motion video which was nothing new to me or the multimedia hacking community at the time. Studying the mix of data formats present on the discs, I found a selection of straightforward formats such as WAV for audio and BMP for still images. I generally find myself more fascinated by how computer games are constructed rather than by playing them, and this mix of files has always triggered a strong “I could implement a new engine for this !” feeling in me, perhaps as part of the ScummVM project which already provides the core infrastructure for reimplementing engines for 2D adventure games.

  Tying all of the assets together is a custom high-level programming language. I have touched on this before in a blog post over a decade ago. The scripts are in a series of files bearing the extension .ini (usually reserved for configuration scripts, but we’ll let that slide). A representative sample of such a script can be found here :

  clue-chronicles-scarlet-1.txt

  What Is This Language ?
  At the time I first analyzed this language, I was still primarily a C/C++-minded programmer, with a decent amount of Perl experience as a high level language, and had just started to explore Python. I assessed this language to be “mildly object oriented with C++-type comments (‘//’) and reliant upon a number of implicit library functions”. Other people saw other properties. When I look at it nowadays, it reminds me a bit more of JavaScript than C++. I think it’s sort of a Rorschach test for programming languages.

  Strangely, I sort of had this fear that I would put a lot of effort into figuring out how to parse out the language only for someone to come along and point out that it’s a well-known yet academic language that already has a great deal of supporting code and libraries available as open source. Google for “spanish dolphins far side comic” for an illustration of the feeling this would leave me with.

  It doesn’t matter in the end. Even if such libraries exist, how easy would they be to integrate into something like ScummVM ? Time to focus on a workable approach to understanding and processing the format.

  Problem Scope
  So I set about to see if I can write a program to parse the language seen in these INI files. Some questions :

  1. How large is the corpus of data that I need to be sure to support ?
  2. What parsing approach should I take ?
  3. What is the exact language format ?
  4. Other hidden challenges ?

  To figure out how large the data corpus is, I counted all of the INI files on all of the discs. There are 138 unique INI files between the 3 discs. However, there are 146 unique INI files after installation. This leads to a hidden challenge described a bit later.

  What parsing approach should I take ? I worried a bit too much that I might not be doing this the “right” way. I’m trying to ignore doubts like this, like how “SQL Shame” blocked me on a task for a little while a few years ago as I concerned myself that I might not be using the purest, most elegant approach to the problem. I know I covered language parsing a lot time ago in university computer science education and there is a lot of academic literature to the matter. But sometimes, you just have to charge in and experiment and prototype and see what falls out. In doing so, I expect to have a better understanding of the problems that need to solved and the right questions to ask, not unlike that time that I wrote a continuous integration system from scratch because I didn’t actually know that “continuous integration” was the keyword I needed.

  Next, what is the exact language format ? I realized that parsing the language isn’t the first and foremost problem here– I need to know exactly what the language is. I need to know what the grammar are keywords are. In essence, I need to reverse engineer the language before I write a proper parser for it. I guess that fits in nicely with the historical aim of this blog (reverse engineering).

  Now, about the hidden challenges– I mentioned that there are 8 more INI files after the game installs itself. Okay, so what’s the big deal ? For some reason, all of the INI files are in plaintext on the CD-ROM but get compressed (apparently, according to file size ratios) when installed to the hard drive. This includes those 8 extra INI files. I thought to look inside the CAB installation archive file on the CD-ROM and the files were there… but all in compressed form. I suspect that one of the files forms the “root” of the program and is the launching point for the game.

  Parsing Approach
  I took a stab at parsing an INI file. My approach was to first perform lexical analysis on the file and create a list of 4 types : symbols, numbers, strings, and language elements ([]{}()=., :). Apparently, this is the kind of thing that Lex/Flex are good at. This prototyping tool is written in Python, but when I port this to ScummVM, it might be useful to call upon the services of Lex/Flex, or another lexical analyzer, for there are many. I have a feeling it will be easier to use better tools when I understand the full structure of the language based on the data available.
  
  The purpose of this tool is to explore all the possibilities of the existing corpus of INI files. To that end, I ran all 138 of the plaintext files through it, collected all of the symbols, and massaged the results, assuming that the symbols that occurred most frequently are probably core language features. These are all the symbols which occur more than 1000 times among all the scripts :

     6248 false
     5734 looping
     4390 scripts
     3877 layer
     3423 sequentialscript
     3408 setactive
     3360 file
     3257 thescreen
     3239 true
     3008 autoplay
     2914 offset
     2599 transparent
     2441 text
     2361 caption
     2276 add
     2205 ge
     2197 smackanimation
     2196 graphicscript
     2196 graphic
     1977 setstate
     1642 state
     1611 skippable
     1576 desc
     1413 delayscript
     1298 script
     1267 seconds
     1019 rect
  

  About That Compression
  I have sorted out at least these few details of the compression :

  bytes 0-3    "COMP" (a pretty strong sign that this is, in fact, compressed data)
  bytes 4-11   unknown
  bytes 12-15  size of uncompressed data
  bytes 16-19  size of compressed data (filesize - 20)
  bytes 20-    compressed payload
  

  The compression ratios are on the same order of gzip. I was hoping that it was stock zlib data. However, I have been unable to prove this. I wrote a Python script that scrubbed through the first 100 bytes of payload data and tried to get Python’s zlib.decompress to initialize– no luck. It’s frustrating to know that I’ll have to reverse engineer a compression algorithm that deals with just 8 total text files if I want to see this effort through to fruition.

  Update, January 15, 2019
  Some folks expressed interest in trying to sort out the details of the compression format. So I have posted a followup in which I post some samples and go into deeper details about things I have tried :

  Reverse Engineering Clue Chronicles Compression

  The post Parsing The Clue Chronicles first appeared on Breaking Eggs And Making Omelettes.

• Q&A : An interview with Matomo founder, Matthieu Aubry

  20 novembre 2018, par Joselyn Khor — About, Community

  Hey everyone ! Joselyn here. As always the views of our community remain top of mind. So to make sure you guys know the thinking behind these new projects, we reached out to Matomo’s founder, Matthieu, to ask questions you might want answered. Please check it out below !

  Hi guys, it’s Matthieu ! Here to answer some questions about the rebrand and the future of Matomo and Innocraft.

  What’s upcoming ?

  We’ve been busy implementing our rebrand into all aspects of Matomo and there’s also our new website, which is launching today ! The new website will help people better understand what Matomo is and how they can benefit from using modern web analytics.

  Why was Matomo and Innocraft brought onto one website ?

  In the past the separation caused a bit of confusion so we’re taking this as a chance to unite both the business brand, Innocraft and community brand, Matomo, on one website. Putting our focus on one brand, Matomo, makes it easier for people to see us with fresh eyes. We have a community side as well as a business side and while the community is still incredibly important to us, we find we have a powerful analytics tool that is capable of helping businesses too.

  Is Matomo becoming commercial or turning corporate ?

  No. nothing is changing. Matomo is still an open-source project and community. Although we’ll have a pricing page and “start free trial” on the new website brought over from Innocraft.cloud, the Matomo community will still play the biggest part on the Matomo website. We have dedicated sections focused on Community and On-Premise.

  The rebrand exercise helped us gain a refreshed perspective. After reflecting on how far we’ve come, we can feel more confident about Matomo Analytics itself as a platform. We believe it’s a great chance to bring that confidence into the brand and vision. We are proud that it’s an awesome open-source platform and at the same time it’s also powerful as a tool for businesses.

  Why is there no ‘download for free’ button on the homepage ?

   

  
  We feel many users coming to the site will get confused about our hosting options (Cloud and On-Premise) which is something you don’t usually consider when choosing an analytics tool.

  The reason for us to not have that button is when people see a “download for free” button on the homepage next to a “try it for free” button, it creates confusion. For those who do choose to download Matomo often become confused when they are left with a .zip file unaware how to install it and the technical requirements of self-hosting. We feel presenting our users with the simplest installation option first will give them the best chance possible to try Matomo to its full potential, without cost.

  And you can still find the link to Download Matomo in the footer of each page.
  

   

  Is Matomo still free to download and have forever ?

  Absolutely. The free open-source download can be found on the On-Premise section of the website, or download Matomo here.

  Why is it important to have a business behind the project ?

  There’s the reality that we have to make money in order for the Matomo project to survive … and thrive. The reason we still need a business side (Innocraft) is to fund and sustain the Matomo project. Whenever people purchase premium features, this helps finance the development of Matomo for our community.

  Because of the business we’re able to continually maintain and develop Matomo for you guys as well as future users. For example, the next release Matomo 3.8.0 is already mostly developed and will bring lots of interesting features too, like the two-factor authentication, Brute Force Protection, failed tracking requests reporting, lots of JavaScript tracker improvements, a new total summary row below reports, and many more security fixes, bug fixes, and other new features.

  So we see a business being very helpful in supporting our open-source community. Without a business side, our free, open-source project would not be able to survive.

  How will you protect the Matomo project ?

  We’ve ensured the Matomo project will be protected for the future as we wish to turn it into a not-for-profit foundation.

  We’ve also got a safeguard where the open-source code will stay under a GPL license forever. This is so we can guarantee, that no matter what happens, the Matomo project itself will stay completely free software.

  Is there a way for people to help ?

  There are heaps of ways to help ! You can help other Matomo users in the forums, contribute to fixes on GitHub, leave a great review (e.g. alternativeTo), help look for bugs with our Security Bounty Programme or participate and spread the word about Matomo in our community social media pages – Mastodon, Facebook, Twitter. Telling your friends about us would be very helpful too !

  What’s planned for the future ?
  We’ve worked hard to become the #1 open-source analytics platform (1.4 million websites use Matomo today), but now we need to empower even more individuals and businesses to take back control of their own data.

  Showing our community that we have a powerful platform is crucial, but alongside that our values are what define us. User privacy is still of utmost importance and we’re here to make it known that power needs to rest in the hands of people and not large corporations.

  You can rest easy knowing you’re doing your part in using trustworthy and dependable tools. By joining many other companies who are growing this movement to decentralise the Internet, we can build a safer, online world together.

  Join this analytics revolution and let us know what you think about Matomo !