Erik Neu on the Userland discussion forum pointed to an article about Eric Schmidt (of Novell)'s whine that cookies are insecure . This is the problem with giving the Pointy Haired ones labels for information. A clue, Mr. Schmidt: This is an OS issue, not a protocol one, and if you'd been using an operating system whose designers gave a damn about user security it wouldn't have happened. It's great that you're marketing a workaround for a workaround, but since it's already been done right in the first place, why not just use the original solution? "Cookies are a great idea, they are just stored in the wrong place", but he then proposes that we should trust his servers rather than our own computers. Yeah, right.
And it probably wasn't really cookies anway, my experience with some Bay Area consulting firms (Who shall remain nameless so that I don't end up with huge legal bills from defending myself) indicates that your credit card number was probably stolen when someone put an e-commerce server on an unaltered Dead Rat 5.0 box without a root password. Y'all wouldn't believe the incompetence that's masquerading as "Internet expertise".
Friday, December 3rd, 1999 danlyke@flutterby.com