Slashback: Cookies, Germans, Art

More on privacy as seen by legislators; a hopefully luckfilled update on graphics software you may be waiting for; and a denial from Germany on the "getting rid of Microsoft software" claims touted not long ago. All below in tonight's episode of Slashback.

Buried in the fine print is where you will find Jimmy Hoffa and mitigation. Sarcasmo writes "I'm hoping you'll post this story, since it's partly a correction/update of a previous story on Slashdot. While Senator Edwards' bill, S. 197, does come down on spyware in a very good way, it doesn't as the previous article suggested, "require commercial web sites to ask permission from the user before a cookie can be set or personal information collected." To quote the bill itself:

"(B) The term does not include a text file, or cookie, placed on a person's computer system by an Internet service provider, interactive computer service, or commercial Internet website to return information to the Internet service provider, interactive computer service, commercial Internet website, or third party if the person subsequently uses the Internet service provider or interactive computer service, or accesses the commercial Internet website."

Though I did come across this bill introduced to the house by Representative Green of Texas -- and it seems to come down just as hard on cookie use specifically."

Oh, baby, I love your photo-realism -- it's so ... real-seeming. After wryly noting that the last few times it's been featured in this forum it's been while he was on a plane, or in the middle of bug-fixing, or while being boiled alive by cannibals, etc, Paul Nolan says of his Photogenics graphics software:

"Well, it was a long hard slog, but it's finally out, the press release is here.

There's a pretty good chance there will be a local power outage today, on the off chance that would increase my chances ;)"

Nicht wahr, nicht wahr. sconeu writes "According to Wired, a German Defense Ministry official has denied the original report in Der Speigel about the Microsoft ban ... Oh well..."

Comments

German Microsoft non-ban

[sparty]

Okay, read the article first. It includes comments from Andy Mueller-Maguhn, a leader of Berlin's Chaos Computer Club and also Europe's representative on the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), about the political sensitivities that might be offended by a German move away from Microsoft for all security-sensitive stuff (in other words, the US Government might be offended by "US Software is Insecure" being bandied about by the German government). The article suggests that the original report may, indeed, be accurate.

Beyond that, why announce to the world that your sensitive systems are or are not running any given OS or group of OSen? I mean, "Our sensitive systems will no longer run NT" (if an accurate statement) lets crackers know that (a) NT-only exploits won't work and (b) if they do, the box is uninteresting. Of course, that is assuming the statement is accurate ("Hey, Hans, how about if we disuguise the DoD C&C codes as marketing data and put zem on one of zose NT servers?" "Ah, excellent, Frans. Zee stupid Americans vill never realize.")