Novell chief's credit card stolen online
Eric Schmidt blames cookies for cyber theft -- calls cookies 'one of the biggest disasters for computers.'
By Ben Elgin, Sm@rt Reseller
UPDATED December 2, 1999 3:26 PM PT
Novell chief Eric Schmidt knows firsthand the problem of Internet fraud.
Speaking at San Francisco's Digital Economy conference Thursday, Schmidt informed the crowd that his credit card number had been stolen over the Internet in the past.
Although he isn't sure exactly how his card number was lifted, Schmidt says he believes it was through a mechanism that reads the cookies-files sitting on a user's desktop and storing personal information, such as passwords and preferences.
"Cookies are one of the biggest disasters for computers in the past [several] years," says Schmidt, citing the lack of security and the blatant breach of consumer privacy.
As Novell's chairman and CEO, Schmidt is trying to oust cookies with his company's new "digitalme" online identification-management service. Based on Novell Directory Services technology, digitalme is aiming to store and consolidate a user's multiple passwords, address books, favorites lists and purchasing preferences.
"Cookies are a great idea, [but] they are just stored in the wrong place," says Schmidt.
Schmidt's brush with cyber thieves may have left him wary, but not a whole lot poorer. "My liability was $50 ... [but] I'm not sure what the credit card company's liability was," he says.
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