Hal Finney wrote:
It is interesting to consider how shopping carts might be done without cookies and similar technologies which allow servers to get more information about me than necessary.
One partial solution would be to turn cookies into nonces - instead of using server-supplied cookies, which may or may not contain hashed/hidden information, client software (and by extension, the human(s) in charge of it) could control the generation and modification of cookies. Some cookie uses are predictable - e.g., "Put the current date and time in the cookie", or "Put the user's E-mail address in the cookie". The user could be presented with dialog boxes asking "Server sneaky.tricky.com would like to set a cookie which will record the date and time of this visit. OK?" or "Server sneaky.tricky.com would like Netscape to generate a random number to keep track of your visits. OK?" A switch from server-generated cookies to client-generated cookies shouldn't involve too many changes on the client software side. (One danger which occurs to me about such a scheme is the potential leakage of client state information, assuming that the algorithm used to generate the pseudorandom cookies is or will be known to attackers.) -- Greg Broiles |"Post-rotational nystagmus was the subject of gbroiles@netbox.com |an in-court demonstration by the People http://www.io.com/~gbroiles |wherein Sgt Page was spun around by Sgt |Studdard." People v. Quinn 580 NYS2d 818,825.