Vipul Ved Prakash wrote:
*** NSCLean, IECLean provide privacy for surfers
Heightened awareness of cookies ...
I see complaints about cookies all the time, and I just have to wonder why the fuss seems so relatively, well, unsophisticated, for lack of a better word. The cookie idea, in and of itself, is really a pretty good one and can provide some useful features. Things like auto-configuring web sites ("my Yahoo", though I don't know for sure how that works) can exploit the cookie capability to provide convenience. I just can't get worked up over it. The cookie issuer still doesn't really know who the visitor is, of course, unless the visitor explicitly hands over that information. "Naughty" uses of cookies for tracking sites visited might be objectionable, I suppose. It's easy enough to do selective editing of the cookie file of course (maybe this NSClean product can do that). One of the scary things might be that though cookies can be made hard to forge, it's clearly impossible for cookie issuers to ensure the cookies aren't stolen or deliberately distributed. If a site uses a "secure" cookie as a means of identifying the web visitor, there's certainly some risk if it then allows access to sensitive information. -- ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ Mike McNally -- Egregiously Pointy -- Tivoli Systems, "IBM" -- Austin mailto:m5@tivoli.com mailto:m101@io.com http://www.io.com/~m101 ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^