I'm seeing more and more sites requiring cookies simply to browse the site. For instance, I was looking up locations for a clothing retailer. They used MSN Expedia as a source for their maps. Fair enough. But apparently just to look at the map, I have to allow all sorts of .expedia.msn.com and .msn.com cookies to be set. Just to look at one image. Law.com won't let you read any articles without using cookies. They're somewhat less intelligent about it; they try to set the cookie and then check it in javascript embedded in the page. If you disable javascript, you can view the articles just fine. Or you could download them using a non-graphical client like curl or wget and view it locally. But that ignores the point. I can think of no instance where cookies can be justified on technical grounds. Session management is a solved problem. Now, transparent logins are convenient, but that's it for cookies. Mainly, I think the website programmers are just lazy. Either that or some exec made a bone-headed decision to try to coerce the web-browsing population at large to enable cookies. Of course, I'll just go elsewhere. And when that becomes too difficult, no doubt there will be a plugin for Mozilla that allows you to specify that certain sites get random values for the cookies they set. Trying to coerce users with this sort of strong-arming is stupid and counter-productive. At best, they set off an arms race with those trying to circumvent these measures. At worst, they drive customers away. Why go through all that trouble when they can accomplish 99% of what they want by doing a tiny amount more work (in many cases, most of which they're already doing)? Audiogalaxy still works in Lynx! The whole point of this web business is that anybody can do it. And yet we still find publishers of all shapes and sizes trying to lock users into their own fenced of pieces of the web. Companies who long for the early 90s when the only access was Compuserve or AOL or Prodigy, completely controlled environments. Not only do people not want that, it's obvious that people don't want that. Look at the number of people subscribed to an online service in 1995 and compare it to today. These people don't understand how to serve us, plain and simple.

¶ 375 Posted at 12.38 AM ⇒ No Comments ( stupid people | internet | privacy | web )