[PLUG] OT: Yahoo! is watching you...

Bill bill at coho.net
Sat Apr 20 05:43:23 UTC 2002


Interesting discovery for those using Opera--if you tell it not to save 
new cookies on exit it will still let folks access old cookies they have 
planted.  The cookie file ($HOME/.opera/cookies4.dat) seemed to have some 
binary (non-ascii) data in it, so I was worried about editing it by 
hand.  As an experiment I moved it to another 
directory, restarted opera (I had already set the thing to not save 
cookies 
on exit) and logged into Yahoo.  It let log in, made itself a new 
cookes4.dat file, but apparently did not store anything in it.  So for a 
mild tradeoff in convenience you can at least make things a little harder 
for webbug tracking.  Of course, I am assuming that the free version of 
Opera isn't tracking my every move when it gets its %^&$ ads.

Bill

On Fri, 19 Apr 2002, Sandy Herring wrote:

> On Fri, 19 Apr 2002, Dean S. Messing wrote: 
> [...]
> > Thanks for the heads up, Sandy.  Now would someone kindly 'spain how
> > they do this?  Please disabuse me of my naivete.
> 
> They're also known as Web Bugs...
> 
> http://www.privacyfoundation.org/resources/webbug.asp
> 
> Sandy
> 





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