Site Privacy issues

From: Gordon JC Pearce <gordon_at_gjcp.net>
Date: Sun Sep 19 14:29:41 2004

John Lawson wrote:

> What irked me (and still irks me) about your post, was *not* your
> feelings towards my admittedly paranoid view anent intrusions on my
> personal computers - no, what pissed me off was that I was ready to
> learn from you and honor your knowledge - I was thinking that rather
> than engage in jejune absurdities, you'd have taken the time and space
> to help me out a bit - show me that perhaps I'm over-reacting - tell me
> why I oughta let the little cookies live on my machines.

Ok, ok... In my own defence might I just say that I have spent roughly
a third of my 2-and-a-half weeks holiday clearing up the devastation
that only unpatched Windows 2000 machines can bring, and was feeling a
little sore when I posted.

> Instead, you very heavily patronized *myself* with your adolescent
> screed of more-and-more ridiculous questions... "do I remove the battery
> at night and re-set the BIOS every morning" indeed!

Don't laugh. I knew someone who did this. Really. They had read in
$pseudotechy_periodical that viruses could live in the NVRAM in your PCs
clock chip. I kid you not.

> I have had this IBM Thinkpad for about five years now, and got it
> while I still lived and working in Southern India. I have a firewall, a
> virus-checker, a spyware checker, and I disallow active-X, Java, Flash,
> Coookies (unless I can't get business done w/out them)etc. To date I
> have had one 'infection'; the Welchia Worm. And I got that during a
> network setup sesson at my employer's - I had to shutdown my firewall to
> synchronize permissions and set up various clients, someone else on the
> network was infected and I got it. Noticing that my port was
> communicating at nearly it's capacity and my computer was getting slow,
> I scnned it and killed the bug. And that has been the only problem I've
> had to deal with in five years.

I had a clever-clogs in the office of an Internet service provider I
used to work for disconnect his PC from the LAN and hook up a modem so
he could "send mailshots properly" - he'd taken it upon himself to do a
spot of "advertising" for our company. He was dialled up for around 25
minutes, and his machine was infected with Blaster. This is despite
keeping it up-to-date (there wasn't a patch at this point), although
there was no firewall software on the machine. Not a lot of point, when
you're supposed to be behind a proper firewall, is there?

> Thus am I being: Paranoid? Careful? Absurd? You tell me, Gordon. Just
> keep the sarcasm and grandiose flights of superiority to yourself, please.

Eeeh, ok. Well, everyone is entitled to their opinions. Certainly
people can and do use cookies for identifying repeat visits, for
advertising and the like. You can block these with any Mozilla-based
browser, and someone said (possibly on this list) that IE6 can do it now
too. Since I don't run Windows (never have done, don't intend to) I
can't verify this. Leaving cookies off and only turning them on for
sites that need them seems a bit pointless and inconvenient, but if it
makes you happier then go right ahead.

I have to say, I am somewhat surprised at the number of people who do
use Windows on this list. I would have thought that the various
open-source Unix-alikes would have appealled more. Just don't let the
l337 skript kiddies get any ideas, in case they come up with some 0-day
'sploit for TSS-8!

Gordon.
Received on Sun Sep 19 2004 - 14:29:41 BST