Legal Notice and Privacy

This page states who publishes The Menu Bar, what the site collects, and how it handles the record it keeps. It is written to be read, not skimmed past a cookie banner, because the site runs no advertising, sets no tracking cookies and sells nothing, which keeps the legal position pleasantly short.

The publisher

The Menu Bar is an independent online magazine published at macsos.com.au. The site holds no connection to MacSOS Pty Ltd, the former Sydney software company whose twenty year tenancy of this address is documented in the story of this domain. All product names, past and present, are the property of their respective owners and are used here descriptively, in editorial context, without suggestion of endorsement by or affiliation with any of them. Prices and dates quoted in the history pages are facts as published at the time, offered as record, not as offers.

Editorial responsibility and corrections

Everything on the site is written in house. Where the magazine states a historical fact, the source, usually the archived pages of the site itself or documentation current at the time, is named in the text. Where the magazine expresses a judgement, it is an editorial judgement and is presented as one. Errors are corrected openly: the page is fixed and, where the error was substantive, a dated note records the change. Corrections and disputes are heard by mail at the address on the contact page, and takedown requests concerning quoted material are considered seriously and answered in writing.

Privacy

The site collects no personal data of its own. It runs no registration, no comments, no newsletter and no analytics of its own. It serves pages over HTTPS, and the infrastructure that delivers those pages, like most of the web, processes request logs, including IP addresses, strictly for security and delivery purposes under the standard practice of the hosting provider; those logs are not the magazine's and are not used to profile anyone. Mail sent to the editorial address is kept as long as the conversation it belongs to, is read only by the editorial side, and is never sold, shared or added to a list, because there is no list to add it to. No cookies are set for tracking; nothing on the page follows the reader anywhere.

Content and reproduction

The articles, guides and design of The Menu Bar are the magazine's own work. Short quotations with a visible link back are welcome and need no permission; systematic republication, scraping or mirroring of the site, or presenting its pages as another publication's work, is not. The historical record quoted from public archives belongs to its originators and is cited as such. Where an archived page is quoted as a source, the archive is named so the quotation can be checked at its origin. The magazine publishes from Australia and these terms are offered in that context.

Accessibility

The site is built to be readable by everyone, and the commitments are concrete rather than declared. Pages use real heading structure and real links, images carry descriptive text, colour contrast is kept at levels the sighted and the colour blind can both work with, and the layout holds when text is enlarged. The magazine knows a plain static site is itself an accessibility feature: it loads fast, works with screen readers and assistive technology without ceremony, and behaves the same on an old machine as on a new one. Where a reader meets a barrier, that is a correction, and the contact page is the door for it.

Changes to this notice

This notice describes the site as it runs today, and it will be updated if the practice changes, in plain language, with the change visible on the page rather than buried. The magazine reserves nothing unstated: what is written here is the whole of the practice, and any future addition, a newsletter, a statistics service, anything at all that touches a reader's data, will arrive with an update here and a reason given. The dated record of the site's own pages, kept by the public archives, means this promise is checkable after the fact, which is exactly how the magazine prefers its promises.