Zombie Cookies Just Won't Die 189
GMGruman wrote in to say "Microsoft embarrassed itself last week when it got caught using 'zombie cookies' — a form of tracking cookies that users can't delete, as they come back to life after you've 'killed' them. Microsoft says it'll stop the 'aberrant' practice. But Woody Leonhard says you ain't seen nothing yet. It turns out HTML5 offers a technical mechanism to give zombie cookies a new lease on life — and the Web browsers' private-browsing features can't stop them."
Re:No problem (Score:4, Interesting)
Add in PasswordMaker to that list and you've pretty much summed up why I can never leave Firefox, no matter how batshit-loco the design team gets. :(
Re:ZOMBIE BROWSERS (Score:4, Interesting)
I am sorry, but just talking about cookies doesn't go far enough to describe what is happening here. It is about zombie browsers, that are just building in more and more functionality to turn your computer into a device that is not controlled by you, but is controlled by various special interests.
From tablets to cell phones, tell me something I don't know. A lack of control down into the lower levels of these types of devices has been lacking for some time now.
There needs to be a way for the user to control what is happening on his machine, otherwise it's not a general purpose computer, but some proprietary gadget that you have there...
Uhhh, yeah..which is exactly their intent with this design. In much the same way that human voice interaction is dying, so is the "personal" computer. What the hell do you need "flexibility" for when every device will be reduced to a pseudo-tablet in the near future, with everything moving to the "cloud"? Allow the functionality, introduce multiple attack vectors and nightmares for support. Lock it down, and you piss off the user community who gets pissed off every time they get a virus or malware infection. Of course, they got infected because they want flexibility.
Since we already know why you should draw a line, the question is where do you draw the line.
"zombie cookies" means Flash cookies (Score:5, Interesting)
The article does a major disservice to everyone (and I wish we could mod it down) by making up the term "zombie cookies." This new bullshit term hides what's going on and makes us all a little bit stupider. All I have to do to answer your question, is tell you what the article is really about. Instead of making up a bullshit term to confuse you, I'll use a descriptive term.
Ready?
Flash Cookies. The article is about websites caught using Flash cookies instead of browser cookies.
See, asshole-who-wrote-the-article, that wasn't hard. Flash cookies. Now instead of misleading people into thinking their browsers have a problem with cookies and other local storage, people see that the real problem they have with their browsers is plugins, which allows them to run native code that totally bypasses all the browsers' policies.
Flash cookies. Watch all the questions disappear .. but oops .. all the traffic to the fucking article disappears too, since people don't have to click through, read the first article that makes the weird reference to zombies, then click through to another article that explains WTF "zombie cookies" are about.
Slashdot should not have linked to this piece of shit.