From: heb_roots_chr@mail.geocities.com Sent: Friday, October 17, 1997 11:49 PM To: Hebraic Heritage Newsgroup Subject: AOL / Big Brother and Cookies
From: "Christian Word Ministries" To: heb_roots_chr@geocities.com Subject: Validity of article Dear Mr. Hannaford I would like to confirm that this article is true. Please write us back to confirm the validity of this article. We are a Christian News source and would like to get verification somehow so that if it is true we can let our readers know the truth. Thanks Christian Word Ministries *********************************************************************** From: crispen@INTERNIC.NET To: heb_roots_chr@geocities.com Subject: AOL and Cookies AOL UBER-COOKIES ---------------- Time to squish another urban legend! :) Many of you may have recently received an anonymous e-mail letter from a disgruntled former America Online (AOL) employee warning you that AOL 4.0 (code name "Casablanca") contains an "uber-cookie" that is far more treacherous than the simple internet cookie. How would you like somebody looking at your entire hard drive, snooping through any (yes, any) piece of information on your hard drive. It could also read your password and log in information and store it deep in the program code. The letter goes on to say in breathless prose that anytime you are signed on to AOL, any top aol executive, any aol worker, who has been sworn to secrecy regarding this feature, can go into your hard drive and retrieve any piece of information that they so desire. Billing, download records, e-mail, directories, personal documents, programs, financial information, scanned images, etc ... GASP! The story, of course, is a complete and utter hoax. Big shock there. You can read the whole story about the hoax at CNET's news.com at http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,15119,00.html?latest or at ZDNet at http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/content/zdnn/1007/151567.html As Bob Rankin wrote in his 29 July 1997 TOURBUS post titled "A Closer Look at Cookies" (one of the best cookie articles I have ever read, by the way) It's important to remember that a cookie cannot store any personal data such as your name, e-mail address or phone number unless you enter that information on a form at the site creating the cookie. The safety features built into the cookies technology does not allow a website operator to rifle through the files on your hard disk, or to look at cookies that were created by other sites. Remember, folks, cookie files -- even UBER-cookie files (am I am still laughing at that word) -- are simple ASCII text files. ASCII text files are like pieces of paper. Just as a piece of paper sitting on your desk cannot sprout arms and legs and beat up your office's stapler, an ASCII text file (like a cookie) can't "come to life" and do _anything_ to your computer. Both ASCII text files and pieces of paper are inanimate objects that simply sit around, doing nothing more than containing the information that has been put in/on them. Period. By the way, special thanks goes to TOURBUS rider Rich Tatum for pointing me to ZDNet's article (I tend to get most of my tech news from news.com and Good Morning Silicon Valley). :) ===================================================================== .~~~. )) (\__/) .' ) )) Patrick Douglas Crispen /o o \/ .~ Network Solutions Inc. / The InterNIC {o_, \ { Business E-mail: crispen@internic.net / , , ) \ Personal E-mail: crispen@brigadoon.com `~ '-' \ } )) http://www.brigadoon.com/~crispen/ _( ( )_.' '---..{____} Warning: squirrels. **************************************************************************