Mokka mit Schlag » Privacy

I’ve been running short on dress pants, so Sunday I stopped at Sears to take advantage of their Memorial Day sale and upgrade my wardrobe. I bought about a dozen assorted items, and when I left the store the door scanners started beeping. The security guard and I both looked through my bag, but didn’t find anything. However when I got home I found this:

Seems the clerk forgot to remove a security tag from one of the pairs of pants. Anyone know how to get this off of the pants without tearing them or going back to the store?
(more…)

I’m not sure how widespread this problem is. However in the last week or two I vaguely noticed extra text at the bottom of some messages I was replying to. At first I thought it was more of that annoying top posting where my correspondents kept adding their comments to the top of a message and not bothering to delete what had gone before. However, when I took a closer look at some it I was shocked. It was coming out of my Inbox. Somehow Thunderbird was appending text from other unrelated messages in my Inbox to the replies I was sending to different correspondents!
(more…)

CookieSafe 2.0 (a Firefox add-on) is seriously broken, It no longer allows you to manually enable or disable cookies for a site from its popup menu. I am not the only one having the problem. Stay with CookieSafe 1.x for the moment.
(more…)

Recently Yahoo Groups mailing lists seemed to all start sending out obnoxious image ads in various messages:

Needless to say, this makes me a lot less likely to subscribe to yahoogroups mailing lists. Most new lists are going to Google anyway. However there are several legacy groups I subscribe to that probably aren’t going to switch immediately.
(more…)

In Firefox 1.5, there was a simple preference to tell Firefox to accept cookies for the main site but not for web bugs and advertisers on the site. This was a nice compromise that blocked a lot of privacy-invasive uses of cookies while still allowing most poorly-implemented, cookie-based sites to function. That’s why I was quite surprised when I happened to look at my cookies in Firefox 2 and noticed lots of cookies from sites like ads.pointroll.com and 4.adbrite.com.

Tools -> Options -> Privacy -> Cookies -> “Allow sites to accept cookies” and “for the originating site only”

No big deal. The preference must have been nuked when I upgraded, so I opened up the privacy tab and looked for the right option. It wasn’t there! Maybe in security? Nope. Not there either, nor anywhere else I could find. It seems Firefox has given in to the howling of incompetent developers who never understood HTTP in the first place and were annoyed that their sites broke when users turned off third party cookies. Consequently they eliminated the preference. Don’t worry, however. There is a workaround.
(more…)

I’ve become increasingly concerned about Google’s storing of search data. I use various cookie blockers, page rewriters, and other tools to limit the information Google gets about me. Nonetheless I still have a static IP address that’s only shared with a few other people; and if any company has the skill and talent to aggregate search requests to build profiles of people and invade their privacy, it’s Google. Consequently, I’m switching over Firefox to use a different search engine. I thought I’d start by trying generic.a9.com which promises not to track me. (The regular www.a9.com does track users.) Here’s how:
(more…)