[ILUG] aib 24hour-online

[adam beecher]

"sensible people" Niall? Lovely.

Well, this "unsensible" - or would you prefer "insensible" - person has no
objections to companies gathering completely useless information about me.
Gathering information -anonymous information I might add - on where I browse;
how often I browse there; and what banners I click on; in order to deliver
appropriate marketing and advertising material, doesn't really strike me as a
bad thing. If DoubleClick had gone ahead with their plans to merge the
information with that "real" data operation, it would be a bit different, but
they didn't. Anyway, how many among us actually see the banners any more?

Also, wrt to a previous comment, any site that uses cookies and doesn't have an
alternative backup solution - passing a session via GET in the query string for
example - isn't worth mentioning. Leaving an alterntative out is plain silly.
And one further point - logging URLs for session id's shouldn't have a bearing
on security. It should be quite possible to stop all but the most determined
hacker from using the logged information with a little neat coding.

adam


> -----Original Message-----
> From: ilug-admin at linux.ie [mailto:ilug-admin at linux.ie]On Behalf Of Niall
> Sent: 09 May 2000 16:14
> To: ILUG
> Subject: Re: [ILUG] aib 24hour-online
>
>
> On Tue, May 09, 2000 at 02:56:15PM +0100, adam beecher wrote:
> > > > What annoys me most is that you have to have cookies switched on. grrrr.
> > >
> > > Your preferred solution to this is ... ?
> > >
> >
> > I'd be curious about that one too - I could never understand the general
> > misinformation about cookies propogated on the Internet. Cookie Central
> > <http://www.cookiecentral.com> for example - apparently an "authority" on
> > cookies - paints them in a very bad light, and seems to try to push users to
> > block them as fast as possible. They're very sparse on detail of
> the advantages
> > of cookies, which are numerous. They can save a hell of a lot of
> bother and fuss
> > for both the user and the developer for a start.
>
> The reason sensible people try to avoid cookies as far as possible is that
> very many unscrupulous organisations and web sites (DoubleClick being the
> best know example) use cookies to gather information on people in order to
> market to them as effectively as possible. Many people don't object to this
> - many others, of which I and Noel Carrol are examples, object strongly to
> this and so we disable cookies, which is a problem which we want to use
> sites which use cookies, even for non-nefarious reasons. One technical
> solution to this is to use a cookie blocking proxy (I use Internet
> Junkbuster) and not to proxy the required sites. In this way, you leave
> cookies on in your browser, but the proxy keeps them away (oh! - IJB blocks
> ads too :-) )
>
>
>
> Regards,
>
>
> Niall
>
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