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Technology Stocks : Novell (NOVL) dirt cheap, good buy? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Scott C. Lemon who wrote (30374)	2/16/2000 9:23:00 PM
From: Paul Fiondella	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 42771

Some explanations of cookies and privacy issues "my daughter for your stock picks" If you go to the AT&T long distance site you will find that you can look up someones name, get their telephone number and be given a map showing the exact location of their house in about 15 seconds. Have your name and address disclosed on the internet and someone has a roadmap to your house. Have children and you have placed them at risk. I hope I've cleared that up. So by posting here do I risk my families security? ============== "I'm surprised that the browser vendors don't catch more flack for not educating the end-user about what cookies are being used for, and for not making the default of the browser to reject them!" Scott you cannot get access to certain sites without allowing cookies. For example even a paid subscription to WSJ requires cookies to be accepted to work. Many commercial interent sites including those operated by Microsoft require cookies. I've had my browser set to reject cookies and I'm constantly rejected by sites. They demand disclosure. ================= "We want a digital identity that cannot be compromised and that sits in a digital identity vault. You don't exchange it. Hmmm ... sounds really good. But who owns the vault?" The simple answer is the entity issuing that element of your identity. However ownership doesn't imply much in my idea of a transaction based identity vault where the purpose is to give certainty in commercial transactions that you are who you claim to be and therefore eliminate 90% of the information you are required to disclose to commercial web sites for unnecessary verification. ============== Here is Doubleclick (I think they got their name from George Orwell's doublethink) explaining cookies to the masses. Cookies allow sites and advertisers to "remember" users across pages of a site and across multiple visits to a site. This feature enables e-commerce and Internet advertising in numerous ways, including: Allowing personalization features such as stock portfolio tracking and targeted news stories Allowing shopping cart capabilities and quick navigation across multiple zones of e-commerce sites Remembering user names and passwords for future visits Delivering advertisements targeted to a user's interests Controlling ad frequency, or the number of times a user sees a given ad. How are cookies used by networks and ad servers? When you are first served an ad by by an ad server, it gives your browser a unique number and records that number in the cookie file of your computer. Then, when you visit a Web site on which that server is delivering ads, it can then read this number to help deliver relevant advertising to you. Cookies allow networks and ad servers to: Measure ad effectiveness, or the number of unique users who have viewed and clicked on ads. View utilization of an advertiser's site beyond the ad click. This helps our advertisers cater their content to best answer the needs of their customers. Measure reach, or the number or unique users who have visited a site in a given period of time. Control ad frequency to assure a user is not bombarded with the same ad over and over again. Align user interests with relevant advertisements. For example, users who click on sports ads tend to be interested in car ads also. Through partnerships with our advertisers, compile targetable lists of cookies representing users who have visited the advertiser's site or clicked on the advertiser's banner. DoubleClick does not, and will not target users based on past visits or clicks on adult or gaming sites or banners, nor will we allow advertisers to target based on inferred or actual medical history or sexual preference. (That must be what they did. The best way to read this stuff is to remove the "not"s.) ================== So that is the state of things on the net Scott. And today's NYTimes features a front page article which says in effect that heavy internet use is bad for people based on some Stanford survey. Just a couple of more heavy duty hacker attacks and I expect the FBI to demand that every internet session be traceable and every internet user have a "file".