On of the nice things about being done with school is that I tend to have more time on my hands. (One of the not-so-nice things is that I'm no longer a student, I'm just unemployed.) The question thus arises of what to do with all this time.
Sure, some would say that I should add features to the forums or otherwise be productive, but to that, I say Pah!
Instead, I bring you The P3P Transmogrifier".
Background. One of the classes I took last semester, which was fun for a geek doing an MBA, was Online Privacy. It was taught (primarily) by Lorrie Cranor, of AT&T and chair of the W3C's P3P working group.
Anyway, for a final project for the class, I implemented a web based translator of P3P into English. It was primarily based on the code for the W3C's existing P3P Validator, but cleaned up to run under mod_perl instead of CGI, and (of course) with all the translation added into it. She expressed an interest in using it for testing recommended language for what the various P3P tags do, but with modifications so that additional languages could more easily plug into it. I knew what a hack the internals were anyway, and have more pride than to hand over something that looked like it did at that point to anyone else, so this is the result of a rewrite with those modifications, and some additional checks to try and prevent abuse from you folk.
As an example, here's our privacy policy, P3P policy, and the P3P policy translated. If you run a site, I recommend implementing P3P yourself. As you'll notice when you start plugging in domains, most sites don't. Good resources for starting out:
It looks daunting at first, but it's really just a couple of files you need to put on your server, so do it.
