[3815] in WWW Security List Archive
RE: Germany bans cookies! (and a whole lot more)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Phillip M. Hallam-Baker)
Mon Dec 16 18:59:52 1996
From: "Phillip M. Hallam-Baker" <hallam@ai.mit.edu>
To: "'John Anonymous MacDonald, a remailer node'" <nobody@cypherpunks.ca>,
"www-security@ns2.rutgers.edu" <www-security@ns2.rutgers.edu>
Date: Mon, 16 Dec 1996 16:54:41 -0500
Errors-To: owner-www-security@ns2.rutgers.edu
To understand the reason for Germany's action you
have to understand that during W.W.II the Nazis used
phone company and other records to track down
opponents inside and outside Germany. Since many
of the recent political figures in German politics
were persecuted by the Nazis there is a somewhat
natural concern over privacy of information. More
recently reunification has meant that a large number
of former East Germans who were persecuted by the
Honiker regime have become involved in government.
The result is that Germany is one of the states
that is most concerned about anonymity, privacy
and such like. I can imagine the Germans accepting
anonymous digital cash much more easily than I
could believe the French or the British Govt.
doing so.
I have always considers cookies to be a pretty
disgusting kludge. I never accepted Netscape's
excuse that they wanted to move the burden of
maintaining state from the server to the client.
Essentially I don't think they understand about
threads. I know that there are some UNIX boxes
on which threads are poorly implemented but I
don't accept that a protocol should be designed
around O/S bugs.
I think that it is reasonable for a content provider
to be able to perform limited linkage over
transactions performed by a Web site visitor. For
example it seems reasonable to me for the content
provider to know that users visit the home page,
go to the headlines page, then sport and do business
last. I don't think that it is reasonable for content
provider A to be able to aggregate his database with
content provider B, that makes it too easy for the
content providers to compile lists of suspicious
characters.
Phill
