New Technique for Tracking Web Site Visitors 590
bigtallmofo writes "According to Jupiter Research, 58% of web surfers deleted cookies from their system in 2004. This has sent a loud message to marketers in regard to consumer's preference as to tracking their online activities. The marketers have responded with PIE. Persistent Identification Element (PIE) is a technology that uses Macromedia's Flash MX to track you even without using cookies. Macromedia has created a page to instruct users on how to disable this."
Firefox plugin? (Score:5, Funny)
Does firefox have a plugin that reminds me to either put clothes on or turn off my camera before loading a flash plugin?
Re:Firefox plugin? (Score:5, Funny)
Wouldn't that defeat the purpose of the "flash" plugin?
Re:Firefox plugin? (Score:4, Funny)
Does firefox have a plugin that reminds me to either put clothes on or turn off my camera before loading a flash plugin?
Hey, if someone wants to go to all that effort to see me naked, it's fine with me. Just so we're clear that I will *not* be paying for any therapy that may be required afterward.
Re:Firefox plugin? (Score:3, Insightful)
Speaking of which, is there a plugin that pretends to be a webcam but "records" nothing but the Goatse image? If someone wants a picture of me without politely asking for it they should get what they deserve.
Awesome opportunities! (Score:5, Funny)
2) Create paid-subscription-only amateur pics website
3) The best thing is you don't need a "???" step to profit. And the incoming part is tax-free, because the organization you create to teach teen girls to do their breast self-examination is not for profit...
Re:Awesome opportunities! (Score:3)
Re:Firefox plugin? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:A useful Firefox plugin...but not for your clot (Score:3, Informative)
It still wants you to restart your browser twice. No indication of this fact when you start up the first time. I wonder what other little surprises are lurking. As it is now, I wouldn't recommend this p
I'd delete them too (Score:2, Funny)
Homer Simpson (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Homer Simpson (Score:2)
Bob:Yes!
If you don't use Flash... (Score:2)
Sorry.
And... (Score:5, Funny)
I still won't load plugins into my browser, even if they offer the feature of being able to track me better.
This gives me a great reason (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This gives me a great reason (Score:3, Informative)
Flashblock [mozdev.org]
Re:This gives me a great reason (Score:5, Insightful)
Strong Bad is worth putting up with a little bit of flash for.
Re:This gives me a great reason (Score:4, Informative)
Seems they got you :)
Re:This gives me a great reason (Score:4, Insightful)
I need it to read Strong Bad's email on my Lappy 486, and a few other sites use Flash in a "not so bad" way like animations (yes, I know it's a waste of time) or artistic features.
And if you use the FlashBlock extension, nothing is loaded automatically, you have to click the button to enable a specific animation, nothing to fear.
Re:This gives me a great reason (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:This gives me a great reason (Score:5, Interesting)
Vector drawing is one of those things that sounds like a useless add-on until you consider how much time and disk cash you devote to every two-bit logo you see every day. If logos were all vector graphics, they'd be far smaller, far better looking on whatever display type you happen to have (because YOU get to choose how the rendering is optimized for that device) and generally much more usable.
Woefully, this isn't why people use Flash. People use Flash because they want to ANIMATE, and animation is rarely a boon for the end-user.
Even worse, it's often used to hijack the look and feel of your browser, imposing some horrid DVD-like menu system that you have to re-learn to interact with (and have no hope if you're disabled).
Re:This gives me a great reason (Score:4, Interesting)
It's a double-edged sword, though, and for every site that uses Flash in a decent manner like this, there's a Flash ad with sound effects, and two more with graphics that slide, blink, spin, change colors, and suck up a lot of CPU for no good reason. On top of that, now we have Flash-based click tracking. This seems to happen with a lot of promising technologies; it has an obvious benefit, but the wrong people started using it for the wrong things. Fortunately, at least there's Flash click-to-play.
Re:This gives me a great reason (Score:3, Insightful)
Just as well then... (Score:5, Funny)
I have the Register to thank for this as their story pages are unreadable with Flash enabled due to haveing THREE flaming animations running at a time.
TWW
Yah (Score:3, Insightful)
If it's being used for this then I guess I can finally take the plunge and get it off my machine completely. I guess I'll be missing all that "cool" stuff on "teh interweb" but I'm sure I'll survive.
I bet Macromedia is thinking the same thing.
Flash(id)blocker (Score:4, Interesting)
Flash Shared Objects (Score:4, Informative)
I'm not sure about blocking it, but at least on Windows, the Flash local shared objects are stored in C:\Documents and Settings\user\Application Data\Macromedia\Flash Player and have a file extension of .sol. It is rather easy to delete them. Remote shared objects are a different story, but I don't see how these are really different than server side scripting tricks using sessions (eg, use a php script to serve up an image, and start a session).
Opera blocker (Score:3, Interesting)
those creative IT guys.. (Score:5, Funny)
sheesh what's next.. cake?
-SJ53
Re:those creative IT guys.. (Score:5, Funny)
sheesh what's next.. cake?
Possible. But I'll be my money on FUDge.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Here's another hint... (Score:5, Insightful)
Check out this nugget from the article
United Virtualities's PIE helps combat this consumer behavior by leveraging a feature in Flash MX called local shared objects.
"combat this customer behavior"? Is this how companies are viewing the general public?
Re:Here's another hint... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Here's another hint... (Score:4, Insightful)
I love targetted advertising (Score:5, Funny)
I wish I all advertising was "targetted" so I could promptly register myself as a 113 year old hermaphrodite with no money. Ethnic group? Hittite. Hobbies? Collecting dried cicadas. If you can ever find a dried cicada commercial site, feel free to place an ad link to it on any page I visit. Convicted felon, too, with no voting rights (to avoid political spam as well). Then I could sit back and watch all the spam and popups roll in: all 0 of them.
Re:I love targetted advertising (Score:5, Funny)
Thanks (Score:4, Funny)
Thanks. You're a real pal. Now I know why every single page I visit contains either a flash ad with William Shatner waving Doritos, or from a company with a service that stops basement floods.
Re:I love targetted advertising (Score:3, Funny)
Cicada Mania be just whta you need. [cicadamania.net]
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, that flashblock... (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean, I have flash to play the occasional game or watch a movie. That shouldn't make me susceptible to ads crapping all over my eyeballs.
More importantly, Macromedia should be on my side with this, unless they are somehow benefitting everytime a flash app is loaded (which isn't impossible, but creates a serious conflict of interest).
Re:Oh, that flashblock... (Score:5, Insightful)
Did you pay Macromedia for a Flash plugin? No. Did the web developer pay Macromedia for a tool to create Flash? Yes. Does that answer your question as to Macromedia's loyalty?
What a despicable waste! (Score:4, Funny)
Over half of all web users' cookies? That would be enough cookies to feed the populations of Africa and India for, like, decades.
Say no to Cookies and PIE (Score:5, Funny)
PRON (Score:5, Funny)
thanks, guys! (Score:5, Insightful)
gee, thanks mookie, i just wouldn't know what to believe on the internet if it weren't for all your protection. oh, and thanks for preventing me from deleting my own files. you're right, i really did want those after all. you're such a good friend.
*happy sigh*
Camera / Microphone (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Camera / Microphone (Score:3, Informative)
Who in the right mind would allow random Flash applications access to their camera and microphone? What use would this have?
Flash-based chat rooms, perhaps? I recall seeing a how-to article for this exact purpose somewhere on Macromedia's site a few years back.
Hey! They are trying to HELP US! (Score:2)
"The user is not proficient enough in technology to know if the cookie is good or bad, or how it works," Tanembaum said. "
My, that makes me feel better, knowing that the wise marketeer is looking out for my best interests.
What a shitty link (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What a shitty link (Score:3, Informative)
Step-by-step directions for disabling PIE (Score:3, Informative)
2. Drag the slider to "None". The setting seems to take effect immediately.
3. Click the last tab on the right, a picture of a folder with a green arrow pointing in.
4. Any sites that have already stored data locally will show a value in the "used" column. I had a few suspicious entries in mine which were instantly cleared by clicking "delete all".
Dear Slashdot (Score:4, Funny)
To aid your visitor tracking, here is today's log of my Slashdot visits:
Log on,
Letter
Firefox FlashBlock Plugin (Score:5, Informative)
From the site: "Flashblock is an extension for the Mozilla and Firefox browsers that takes a pessimistic approach to dealing with Macromedia Flash content on a webpage and blocks ALL Flash content from loading. It then leaves a placeholder on the page that allows you to click to view the Flash content."
In most cases I've found this very handy, as ads on websites have recently been switching to a flash format (Yes, I could also be running the adblock extension).
For the few sites that I need it for (MBNA's Shop Safe Applet) I just click where the flash wanted to load, and it allows it.
I highly recommend this extension.
I now understand what those little flash icons trying to load in the corner of the browser were.
Advertising is destroying Flash (Score:5, Insightful)
It's almost, but not quite, time for spyware removal programs to remove Flash as hostile code. It's probably time for programs like AdAware to offer the user the option of easily removing Flash. Perhaps with a message like this:
"Macromedia Flash is a program used primarily to deliver advertising messages. It can turn on your microphone and camera (if present) and transmit the results to advertisers, store personalized data on your machine and transmit it to advertisers, and play commercials with audio. Do you want to remove Macromedia Flash?"
Mod parent up (Score:3, Insightful)
Macromedia? Are you paying attention?
If you let this crap go on too long you're going to wreck your platform. People (a small fraction of them) are starting to think your stuff is a giant hole through which marketing zombies are driving Mac trucks. What happens to you when it's 15, 25 or 50%?
The page you provided is helpful; it also demonstrates
Let them TRY to get to me... (Score:5, Funny)
99% of the time I bail before Flash has time to load .
I think Flash is great.! (Score:3, Funny)
I have uninstalled flash. When I see the little ``puzzle piece'', I know that I've found a site that isn't worth visiting, so Flash is a great time saver for me.
Bill Hicks put it best (Score:4, Funny)
No this is not a joke, you're going, "there's going to be a joke coming," there's no fucking joke coming. You are Satan's spawn filling the world with bile and garbage. You are fucked and you are fucking us. Kill yourself. It's the only way to save your fucking soul, kill yourself. Planting seeds. I know all the marketing people are going, "he's doing a joke"... there's no joke here whatsoever. Suck a tail-pipe, fucking hang yourself, borrow a gun from a friend - I don't care how you do it. Rid the world of your evil fucking machinations. I know what all the marketing people are thinking right now too, "Oh, you know what Bill's doing, he's going for that anti-marketing dollar. That's a good market, he's very smart." Oh man, I am not doing that. You fucking evil scumbags! "Ooh, you know what Bill's doing now, he's going for the righteous indignation dollar. That's a big dollar. A lot of people are feeling that indignation. We've done research - huge market. He's doing a good thing." Godammit, I'm not doing that, you scum-bags! Quit putting a godamm dollar sign on every fucking thing on this planet!
"Ooh, the anger dollar. Huge. Huge in times of recession. Giant market, Bill's very bright to do that." God, I'm just caught in a fucking web! "Ooh the trapped dollar, big dollar, huge dollar. Good market - look at our research. We see that many people feel trapped. If we play to that and then separate them into the trapped dollar..." How do you live like that? And I bet you sleep like fucking babies at night, don't you?"
Attention Flash-bashers (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone who mods me down for expressing this perfectly valid opinion needs to get out more.
Use Mobile Editions of Web Pages (Score:5, Informative)
Some others include:
Amazon.com [amazon.com]
American Airlines [flightlookup.com]
Slashdot [slashdot.org]
Wrong conclusion drawn from the results (Score:5, Interesting)
Bad assumption. This could just mean that people value their privacy. Most people don't even know what cookies are, but they do know that when they clear history, cookies, and everything else, then the next person who uses their computer to hit MSN or Yahoo or a variety of other sites won't accidentally be logged in using their cached credentials.
Also, you're forgetting about all the false positives that many corporate firewalls will generate.
This survey is hopelessly flawed. If you want to collect real data, you have to track how many times users actually go into their browser settings and manually clear the cookies, and you have to also ask them why they are doing it.
SVG (Score:3, Insightful)
My solution is simple (Score:4, Interesting)
Seriously what good at all is Flash ? All it's used for is yet more marketroid spam. Having a flash enabled browser is like inviting an obnoxious teenager to come in your house and yell at you.
So what do I miss not having it ? About 3 mildly entertaining "cartoon" like things (I've seen these on a co workers box and whilst they're quite amusing I don't see my life as being any poorer by not seeing them more often) It utterly amazes me that people will willingly run this crap.
Sorry but I'm old fashioned. The only thing I want from a website is some well crafted HTML/CSS, with some supporting plain "non animated" images, and at the most, some simple client side javascript for stuff like menus (and don't worry I'll be looking at your script first. If I can't see it, it ain't running) You can do what you want on your server but not in my broser.
History has told me that allowing anything else is a disaster waiting to happen (Active-X anyone ?)
But ultimately my message to advertisers etc. is simple. You're not using my resources to advertise at me, to track me, in fact to do anything. You're not welcome to phone me, send me junk mail, knock on my door or stop me in the street. Bother me with your crap and you'll get a simple reply "Fuck off and die".
There that told 'em
Re:My solution is simple (Score:4, Insightful)
Ah, but their advertising is still getting to you. Brand recognition. When was the last time you choose a brand you'd heard of over one you'd never heard of? That's advertising. Otherwise, you'd have heard of neither.
Oh, which Cola do you drink? ;-)
PIE is twice as sneaky as cookies (Score:3, Insightful)
But don't tell marking folks that.
Don't need Flash at all? Here is the uninstall (Score:3, Informative)
How to uninstall Flash player (Tech Note)
http://www.macromedia.com/cfusion/knowledgebase/i
Direct Links
Flash 7
http://download.macromedia.com/pub/flash/ts/flash
Flash 6
http://download.macromedia.com/pub/flash/ts/unins
users are often instructed... (Score:3, Interesting)
Choice Quote: (Score:5, Insightful)
So this is what it's come to: we the consumers are officially enemy combatants?!?
OK then, fine. I can live with that.
But tell me one thing: can a businesses that hires a marketeer that treats their customers thus way live without my business, or say, the business of the 58% of Internet users that are apparently getting tired enough of this crap to actively seek out and delete cookies?
Didn't think so.
Business needs to realize that it is precisely because of this entitlement mentality that people are beginning to get pissed. Personal lives and habits are not a gift given automatically with the purchase of a six-pack. My $3.49 doesn't give you any right to compile a psychological shoppping profile. You want to know about my buying habits? Ask Me!!! Try to take it without my knowledge, or sneak it off my hard drive and I'll treat your business no better than I would a common thief: from an extreme distance, and fully armed.
Re:Not actively deleting cookies (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Not actively deleting cookies (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not actively deleting cookies (Score:4, Interesting)
As far as reinstalling operating systems. Do you really think people really reinstall that often?
Re:Not actively deleting cookies (Score:3, Insightful)
It doesn't count unless you wrote the software yourself, and even then only if it's in assembly. Just like I didn't really make my web page.
AdAware / AntiSpy (was Re:Not actively deleting .. (Score:5, Insightful)
to your point, however, some % of that 58% are likely deleting cookies when e.g. AdAware [lavasoftusa.com] or Yahoo! antispy [yahoo.com] is telling them to clean up this "tracking info."
Regardless, it's a Good Thing users are doing this.
Re:AdAware / AntiSpy (was Re:Not actively deleting (Score:5, Informative)
A few things happen if you dont have cookies, the most important being that we can still do pretty much everything we can do with a cookie, only with less accuracy (since the fallback is to track ads seen/clicked via your IP address):
- we can't implement frequency capping very well. this means you have a much higher chance of seeing the same damn ad, again and again and again. you like?
- we can't tie cookie data to private user data. I'm sure some people try to (although everyone involved, including the user, would have to jump through some pretty annoying hoopes, which is why advertisers dont even bother trying. Beyond the fact that such an act is against virtually every privacy policy in existance, the chances of this happening is slim to none. I don't buy the tin foil hat fears here.
- we can't send you to the right clickthru! I know we dont click on banners very often, but when you do, wouldn't you rather go to the correct clickthru rather than an the clickthru beloning to somebody else's impression who is behind the same firewall as you?
I hate advertising and spyware as much as the next guy, but ad network tracking cookies are harmless. Honestly, why are people scared of them? The more accurately we can report ROI to advertisers, the less annoying advertising becomes since advertisers are able to optmize their campaigns to ensure that they're not wasting impressions on folks who are less likely to care about them.
Is this simply a 'if they cant track me, maybe internet advertising will do away' thing? Because we can still track you, by IP
One thing for sure is that internet advertising isn't going away, and sites that you like (this one included) stand a much better chance of staying subscription-free if the advertiser pays
Re:AdAware / AntiSpy (was Re:Not actively deleting (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:AdAware / AntiSpy (was Re:Not actively deleting (Score:3, Insightful)
More optimized delivery = more money for publisher = less ads for you.
That's nice, but we had somthing different in mind.
No delivery = no money for marketers = no ads for us.
Re:AdAware / AntiSpy (was Re:Not actively deleting (Score:3, Informative)
That's why I use adblock [mozdev.org].
Re:AdAware / AntiSpy (was Re:Not actively deleting (Score:3, Interesting)
all WEB internet traffic is filtered through privoxy.. therefore you can try to show any of us here the same ad over and over all you want. they do not get through and they do not get displayed.
we cut internet bandwidth use by almost 45% by adding a privoxy proxy in front of the corperate proxy.
if we block all your cookies and ad's it's extremely effective.
BTW, you cant track any of us in this company by IP. because it looks like th
Re:AdAware / AntiSpy (was Re:Not actively deleting (Score:4, Interesting)
> all WEB internet traffic is filtered through privoxy.. therefore you can try to show any of us here the same ad over and over all you want. they do not get through and they do not get displayed.
Where, in my parent post, did I say anything about blocking the actual ad requests? I have no problem with this, and if you do it, more power to you. I was talking STRICLY about cleaning cookies as a means of fighting advertisers.
> BTW, you cant track any of us in this company by IP. because it looks like there is one IP address that is surfing a whole crapload of places.
Again, my p[arent post goes to great lengths to point out that I know that, and when we cant use cookies, we use IP addresses, which are inherently less accurate for the very reason you repeat for me.
Its funny, the combative tone some of these replies take. I have no problem with anyone blocking ad servers via proxies
I do NOT like (Score:3, Insightful)
No, I do not like seeing the same ad again and again, but it doesn't happen. I don't look at ads. I have trained my peripheral vision to recognize ad space on a web site, and I deliberately avoid looking. A pop-under escaped my block-pop-up technology yesterday, and there it was sitting under my main window. So I positioned my mouse so that when I
Re:Censored or Mindfucked? What's better? (Score:5, Funny)
Well, I'm the next guy, and it's pretty clear to me that you don't. Deleting cookies and avoiding ads has become kind of a sport for me. I clear 'em out as soon as I'm done with a site or very shortly thereafter; it takes about 2 seconds. You've got my (dynamic) IP address, and that's all you're going to get.
Re:AdAware / AntiSpy (was Re:Not actively deleting (Score:3, Insightful)
I understand your points, even if I don't agree with them all, except for this one:
we can't send you to the right clickthru!
Maybe the average banner ad system really is that stupid, but what's so hard about serving proper links to go with the ad content?
You make it sound like every banner click goes to exactly the same URL, and that destination only knows where to redirect you based on what the cookie says.
Like I said, maybe people are using that setup, but it's about as bad an idea as you cou
Simple answer (Score:5, Informative)
These companies can effectively spy on your use of the web (if not other internet services with web components), watching you travel from site to site and learning your browsing, and even purchasing habits (yes, doubleclick does offer this level of integration with ecommerce sites, much as coremetrics etc does, as a 3rd party analytics provider), since their advertisements are, as they like to claim, "everywhere."
The big conspiracy theory was that they would begin to correlate individual random unique ID's from within this massive database with actual people, by cooperating with major sites that both use doubleclick and register users. They could even mix in more traditional marketing databases, and that could give you can get a pretty nice, deep stare right through anyone's clothing, so to speak. I use that metaphor deliberately, because this kind of power is the equivalent of a sex fantasy to people in the business.
And of course what's the point of doing all this if you can't sell that data all over the countryside?
Yeah yeah, we were all paranoid nuts, pass the tinfoil, ha ha ha. Then they actually started doing it. They bought a major "traditional" consumer database firm and announced their plans to do exactly this. There was an uproar. All covered on slashdot, if I recall correctly. [slashdot.org]
For the layman: Cookies are designed with an important limitation: the cookie "namespace" is tightly bound to the domain from which the cookie was set. This is necessary for a variety of reasons. You don't want site A reading site B's data, for instance.
But a company like doubleclick has their servers hit directly from web pages all over the net. They can set a globally unique identifier cookie on their domain, and use it to track you as you hit pages on every other domain that includes a double click image. And of course they know where you hit their image from various data in the request; the "referer," querystring tagging, etc.
So, uh, you can "trust" doubleclick to do the right thing and not reveal what they know about your travels through the big messy public library we call the internet. But I suggest you "Trust No One," even when the giant faceless marketing company doesn't have unprecedented means, enormous motive, and unique opportunity.
Re:AdAware / AntiSpy (was Re:Not actively deleting (Score:5, Insightful)
You mentioned frequency capping. What frequency capping? After seeing the stupid animated ad for mortgages (you know the one--it has little buttons for every state, in various configurations) or the stupid "click the moving object" ads for the thousanth time, I have no reason to trust advertisers to 'cap' the number of times I see an ad for any given product. I wouldn't mind seeing a few ads for a new product I'm not familiar with, but I'm sick of seeing ads for mortgate refinancing ten or twenty times a day every !*&(*& day. Advertisers seem to just want every consumer to see their ad as many times as possible, without limit. They have proven by their behavior that this is their goal. Why would we trust them when they claim that they need cookies to provide "frequency capping"? There must be some other motive behind it.
If advertisers don't shape up, we are all going to be using Adblock before long. I'm aware that advertising often pays for content, and I'm willing to see ads to have good content, but there are limits. If you make your ads annoying, intrusive, or privacy-violating they will be blocked. Maybe the amount of content on the web will decline, or maybe the existing ad companies will go bankrupt and will be replaced by ones that are more aware of what consumers want. The current trend cannot continue, however.
Re:AdAware / AntiSpy (was Re:Not actively deleting (Score:3, Informative)
Marketing is more than advertising. Marketing also has to do with determining who needs your product - and in fact what your product should be in the first place. That part is not a problem.
Advertising as I would prefer to see it is simply the concept of bringing the existence and capabilities of your product to the attention of potential customers in a nonintrusive way.
Notice I did not say "bring dancing bears and bullshit" to the attention of anyone who happens to have his eyes and ears open within a li
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not actively deleting cookies (Score:5, Insightful)
What advertisers are having a hard time doing is tracking visitors across sites or across casual visits to the same site, and I'm THRILLED by that. Hey, I know it makes their business harder and less cost effective, but that's not really my problem. Let the Web business model collapse a bit more. I think it's healthy.
Oh, and using Flash won't help. Most people are getting wise to Flash and are installing features like the Firefox plugin that requires you to click on an icon in order to activate a flash component (should you want to). I consider Flash dangerous, and I don't execute dangerous code unless I REALLY trust the place I'm getting it.
Re:Not actively deleting cookies (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, that's one positive effect, but what you're missing is that individual sites cannot track their repeat visitors. This is one of the most important numbers you can track - it makes it pretty hard to cater to your audience as a content provider if you don't know how many of the 50,000 people you get to your site in a day have even seen it before.
Remember, it's not just advertisers that track visitors. It's mostly the sites themselves, and site providers use those numbers to try to provide better content for their readers (which will in turn hopefully lead to greater numbers of readers). If, for example, you know that 50% of your audience is repeat visits, and that a majority of those repeat visitors actually come to your site more than once per day (a-la Slashdot), then you will probably want to rotate content in and out more quickly. On the other hand, if you're seeing hardly any repeat visitors at all, then you will know that some substantive changes probably need to be made to the site to encourage repeat business.
Deleting cookies throws this all out of whack and makes it difficult for web sites to know what their readers really want. Of course, there are other ways for sites to track visitors, but it's difficult to do across multiple sessions (repeat visits) without cookies.
Re:Not actively deleting cookies (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Not actively deleting cookies (Score:3, Funny)
wait wait wait...so you would execute dangerous code if trust the source?
Re:Not actively deleting cookies (Score:5, Insightful)
Most people use Internet Explorer and a lot of them do not even know that Firefox (let alone the plugin) exists. I highly doubt they are getting wise to Flash.
Let's not forget, to a lot of people IE is the Internet and/or Google/Yahoo is a web browser.
Re:Not actively deleting cookies (Score:5, Funny)
In that context, the "39% of users" and "once a month" actually sounds very conservative. I wonder where they got their figures?
The irony is that deleting cookies after the fact is not a very good privacy measure -- the people who planted them have already had a good chance to track your usage. It's much more effective to set your browser not to provide cookie information except to the originating site.
In other words, the whole cookie issue is just plain bogus.
That is the dumbest thing I've heard all day.... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Marketer's Suck (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: 1.5 out of 4 ain't bad (Score:5, Informative)
1) Bandwidth hungry.
Not always true. Think about Flash applications. One Flash movie load of 200K can replace a dozen or more page views at 100K each. So 200K vs. 1200K. Which is less?
2) Annoying advertising.
Yep!
3) Section 508 compliance.
You're not even close to right here. Flash does support section 508 compliance. It's just like any web technology, you have to take the time to do it. http://www.macromedia.com/macromedia/accessibilit
4) Google does index Flash
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Google+index
Conclusion. You don't know what you're talking about. I hope you get modded down now that these facts have been linked for you.
Not Quite (Score:3, Informative)
Re: 1.5 out of 4 ain't bad (Score:4, Insightful)
It's probably a tie, or pretty close to it.
On those dozen HTML pages, many elements such as graphics, stylesheets, and client-side scripting are going to be common across all of the pages. After they've been fetched once, they're going to be in the client's browser cache and won't have to be sent across the wire again.
Thus, the first page access will result in 100K going across the network. The second page may only be 30K of new traffic. Depending on how many pages the user needs to visit, HTML could be more or less pageweight.
Given the declining popularity of slow dialup connections, and all the other benefits of using HTML, I would say that if a site could be done equally well in either Flash or HTML except for pageweight, it should absolutely be done in HTML. Which isn't to say that there aren't instances where Flash is the better (or only) solution...
Re:I knew it. (Score:3, Insightful)
Except Flash can reduce bandwidth. It does have vector graphics, you know, something that's been a long time coming in the feeping creature called SVG (did you know the SVG specification even has bits for networking and sound in there? Who needs their image files to connect to the Internet or play sound?).
I can block Flash easily. I can't block Javascript + CSS without severly
Re:Just don't have flash installed or activated. (Score:3, Interesting)
I like Firefox, but thi
Re:58% misguided fools (Score:5, Insightful)
Translation: I'm doing the right thing, so obviously the other 99.9999% of the world is as well and we are all "fools" for believing otherwise.
Please, most websites try to hit me with a doubleclick.net cookie or an advertising.com cookie right away. I'm no "fool" for deleting that sort of thing. Nor am I a fool for deleting all of the miscellaneous cookies I get, e.g. from misconfigured sites which leave Apache's mod_unique_id enabled for no reason.
As for user-tracking cookies, which may well be useful, there are two kinds: session cookies (which my browser does and should delete at the end of the session) and unreliable ones (e.g. ones which treat everyone on a public terminal or a family computer system as the same person). Ditching isn't such a bad idea (though I personally leave a few around from sites which I do use and trust).
Remember, the web is not a publication medium. It is designed to be interpreted by the user's web browser. If the user turns off images, they will see no images. If they turn off flash, there's no flash. If they use a screen-reader... well, you get the idea. That's the way the web was always intended to work. Turning off/deleting cookies is no different. The user controls the experience, plain and simple, and apparently 58% of people have decided to do that. Good for them, especially given the number of junk cookies out there.
Re:Macromedia has a page on how to shut your Pie H (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/e
and what to turn off