Mokka mit Schlag » 2006 » November

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.
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The name servers from EasyDNS seem to be having problems, and as a result lookups into the elharo.com domain are timing out or failing completely. Usually trying again in a minute seems to cure the problem. I’m not sure what’s going on. I’ll open a trouble ticket.

Update: EasyDNS tells me they were the target of a denial of service attack today. Should be fine now.