Daniel Aleksandersen

Is getting user consent for cookies really such a bad thing?

Tuesday, 17. November 2009, 15:49:00

The new cookie consent law in the EU was passed earlier this week. A quick summary of the law follows:

[A Web site cannot set or access cookies unless the user] has given his or her consent, having been provided with clear and comprehensive information.”

What this means is that Web sites in Europe have to start asking their users before they set cookies. They also have to explain what the cookies are used for, and—if I am understanding the law right—what information, exactly, the cookie contains.

Disclosure: I am not a lawyer, and this isn’t legal advice. My interpretation of the law is a bit utopian and may not be correct. Feel free to add a comment to correct me.

This also means developers will have think before setting cookies. Every Web site you go to bombards you with unnecessary and most often unwanted cookies. Imagine that situation changing when developers would have to think first!

1 comment

Crashed a 2 TB hard disk

Monday, 9. November 2009, 07:39:00

hardware

Yesterday, I lost over 2 TB worth of data in an hard drive crash.

Luckily, I am a Backblaze costumer since of last month. So I only lost the 130 GB of data that Backblaze hadn’t gotten around to back up yet. I wounder what those 130 GB data really was … I know one game and two TV shows are missing from my iTunes library. But what else?

I bought one Samsung Story Station, 1.5 TB ed. (Register Hardware review | Amazon referral) and one Seagate FreeAgent Desk, 0.5 TB ed. (AC review | Amazon referral) as replacements for the failed drive.

1 comment

How to: Create more legit looking spam/scam mails

Tuesday, 3. November 2009, 15:19:00

web-analytics, the-web, online-privacy

Here I will explain how you can create more legitimate looking scam email. As an example, we will be gathering personal data including name, email address, and which banks and credit card companies you have a costumer relationship with. Let us get started!

1 comment

From Bubba to Mini

Thursday, 29. October 2009, 00:35:43

hardware, snow leopard

OK, so I have given up on the Bubba experiment. Sold it, and I am now aiming for a Mac Mini as server. (Since Apple just release the product that I actually wanted all along: Mac Mini Server edt.)

So much for open source and cheap solutions …

No comments

Cloud services at home, with the Bubba|Two

Monday, 21. September 2009, 15:26:00

linux, hardware

Saturday, I got a Bubba|Two mini server (above) from Swedish hardware maker Excito. I haven’t had the time to set it up until now, but I know that this is going to be one very interesting home Linux project!

It’s been four years since I left Mac OS X for Linux after Mail in OS X Tiger refused to send my emails in UTF-8. About a year ago I made the switch back to Mac OS for this job as an Mac consultant at Opera. I never really left the Unix world, and now I am going back in to take control of my own online data.

2 comments

SSD performance

Tuesday, 15. September 2009, 16:34:00

hardware

Unfortunately, I have lost the performance data I gathered when I upgraded my Mac mini with an SSD. Even with a Time Machine backup there will always be dataloss when moving over to a new hard drive. Here are some quick impressions about the upgrade.

I don’t know whether the improvements are due to the SSD or my other recent upgrade: Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. I do know, however, that I did an incremental updated from Mac OS X 10.6.0 to 10.6.1 in 46 seconds—including a reboot! That is pretty impressive.

2 comments

Network problems with Opera on Snow Leopard?

Friday, 11. September 2009, 09:47:24

desktopteam, peregrine, IPv6, snow leopard

Users who are on ISPs who have switched on AAAA records on their DNS servers have had problems with pages never loading in Opera 10. The problem is caused by networking changes in Mac OS X 10.6 ‘Snow Leopard’ and Opera 10. This even affected popular pages like google.com.

Long story short: Opera relies on the system to determine IPv6 link capabilities. Due to changes in Snow Leopard, this made Opera 10 attempt to make an IPv6 connection over IPv4 for IPv6/4 hybrid Web sites.

The latest snapshot release introduces a work around that will resolve this problem. The fix may introduce some problems on IPv6 only networks, but it is unlikely to affect any users.

2 comments

No update in a while

Monday, 7. September 2009, 11:14:59

Been some very busy weeks! We have been testing and testing to get 10.0 out the door. If you’ve been living under a rock or simply happen to only ever read this blog hen your online, … here is a nice promotional graphic to explain what have happen: