Posts by asigottech

UK passes buck on Europe's cookie law with copy-paste proposal

So PHP is dead ?

With a lot of PHP systems they need to set PHP session cookies so do they now need to ask permission first and what if the user is sensible and clears browser cache and session information on closing his browser ? if not they have to leave a record of sites visited which defeats privacy.

The same with load balancing cookies etc, third party cookies and flash cookies should not be set without permission but the best way to deal with that is to change default web browser permissions and enforce better cookie settings such as HTTP only and expire when the browser closes.

Average users won't understand the cookie problem anyway (search youtube for "what is a browser" )

The Register for instance is setting four cookies, one of which is a third party cookie set by javascript by Quantcast and I'm sure they do not need all those session cookies just so I can view a page when Im not logged in so what about it El Reg old boy? you gonna lead the way to better site design and privacy ?

Malware protection for the rest of us

hosts file is quick to parse

On any modern system a hosts file is very quick to parse, Indexing via a database (speaking as a web systems nerd) would use more systems resources not less on an average system.

It works for me anyway, I also run Nginx on my local system for various reasons and this means I can see when sites serve ads from dodgy sources, even you tube - http://i38.tinypic.com/j7uw3n.png .

In short no one method can protect you but by using a combination of blockers, plugins like noscript and good anti-virus and firewall protection alongside best user practices (educate your friends!) such as not running as administrator most of the time you can mitigate most attack vectors.

Easy alternative for Linux users

I use Linux and made my own very simple system that works well for me, I symlinked the hosts file from /etc to my home folder and made a simple script the downloads the bad hosts file from http://hosts-file.net/ .

That removes my symlinked file once a month and copies it as my symlinked hosts file, a separate cron job downloads and appends the regularly updated partial hosts file to it every couple of days first removing the whole file then copying the hosts.txt file as hosts and appending the new partial list.

Its simple and easy to do and I have had no problems with it so far.

On a side note on my dual boot desktop (needed for CS5) I mount the windows partition automatically and the same script has a little extra to append to the Windows 7 hosts file