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Computing hopkinsville rant

Beat ISP tracking

Given that New Wave Communications is now looking to track it’s customers. I’m going to show you how to limit the usefulness of the information they can collect. The specific system used by New Wave relies on browser cookies to identify customers. Since cookies are very necessary for a lot of functionality on the web it is not possible to disable cookies completely. However, it is possible limit the lifetime of cookies to a single browser session. Doing this makes tracking via cookies far less useful since the tracking system won’t know from one session to the next that you’re the same person. One side effect that you should be aware of is that if you use cookies to save any website passwords making all cookies session-only would delete them each time you closed the browser.

In Mozilla Firefox 3 it is far more obvious how to do this than in Internet Explorer. I briefly tried looking through IE’s settings but was not successful. The steps are Edit –> Preferences –> Privacy tab then under Cookies you will see “Keep until: <dropdown menu>”. Click on the dropdown menu and select “I close Firefox”. Note that to the right you can click on Exceptions and allow/disallow cookies on a per site basis. For example, if you wanted to stay logged in on a specific site across browser sessions but delete all other cookies.

Session-only cookies in Firefox

Categories
Computing hopkinsville rant

New Wave is tracking the Interwebs

For several months I’ve been noticing splash advertising when a page I try to load is redirected elsewhere. The advertising itself was bad enough but now New Wave Communications has announced they will be allowing people to opt-in to be tracked. In exchange, customers will recieve more “customized” advertising and maybe some service discounts provided by New Wave.

Simultaneously, Security Now! is running a series on the Phorm system for ISP-based advertising (SN149 – SN153).

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Computing

spring cleaning

Today was reserved for spring cleaning. My laptop was far more disgusting than I want to admit. Lots of hair and food particulate was living under the keys becoming it’s own self-sustaining ecosystem. So today I made the time to disassemble the keyboard and thoroughly work all of the crud out. I am quite pleased with the results. Now that I think about it I should have taken pictures of the whole ordeal.