Cookieless Web Tracking Using HTTP's ETag 212
An anonymous reader writes "There is a growing interest in who tracks us, and many folks are restricting the use of web cookies and Flash to cut down how advertisers (and others) can track them. Those things are fine as far as they go, but some sites are using the ETag header as an identifier: Attentive readers might have noticed already how you can use this to track people: the browser sends the information back to the server that it previously received (the ETag). That sounds an awful lot like cookies, doesn't it? The server can simply give each browser an unique ETag, and when they connect again it can look it up in its database. Neither JavaScript, nor any other plugin, has to be enabled for this to work either, and changing your IP is useless as well. The only usable workaround seems to be clearing one's cache, or using private browsing with HTTPS on sites where you don't want to be tracked. The Firefox add-on SecretAgent also does ETag overwriting."
Re:Tracking $$$$ (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing is, you're wrong.
Very, very little of what Obama wants or has done is even close to what the progressives of the left actually want. Health care reform? He enacted the model proposed by the Republicans and devised by a right wing think-tank to create a market-based approach to near-universal healthcare: if you think the left is happy with Obamacare, you're not paying attention.
Its simply *better*, and so we will stick with it. What the left wanted was a single-payer really universal healthcare, but we compromised and were willing to go along with the ACA as long as we'd get a single-payer *option*. Then that got dropped, but most of the left decided to support the ACA anyways because really, it was better then what we have now.
Obama is a centrist; center-right in most issues, occasionally center-left. There is nothing even remotely radical about anything he's done, there's been no great pull to the left. The left has gone a bit farther left then we were a decade or so ago, but that's been in response to the monumental shift the right has gone.
There's a wholesale assault on reproductive and fundamental voting rights going on from the right these days, which is just stunning in that these are things that *only* the most extreme of the right's base want.
On civil rights, surveillance, foreign policy, environment, business regulation, ... and on and on, Obama is not at all in line with what the left wants. He's just not as bad as what the crazy people on the far right want.
Yes, there are some narrow places where the far left and the libertarian wing of the far right actually agree, and its weird when it happens: but those are on very specific and very narrow issues. The problem with that libertarian wing is then they fall flat on their face in when the social conservative bloc of the far right has to be dealt with in primaries, and suddenly small government meets bedroom and private health, and oops.