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The BladeForums.com 2024 Traditional Knife is ready to order! See this thread for details: https://www.bladeforums.com/threads/bladeforums-2024-traditional-knife.2003187/
Price is$300$250 ea (shipped within CONUS). If you live outside the US, I will contact you after your order for extra shipping charges.
Order here: https://www.bladeforums.com/help/2024-traditional/ - Order as many as you like, we have plenty.
So where is Chuck?
- Thread starter Random
- Start date
- Joined
- Oct 8, 1998
- Messages
- 8,917
Wouldn't it be Grand if he was on a Shopping Trip that would provide a 5-gallon bucketfull of BM45 and 48 Balisongs to all of us that wanted them at cost?
Happy~Happy~Joy~Joy...
Never happen. Dammit.
Happy~Happy~Joy~Joy...
Never happen. Dammit.
- Joined
- Aug 17, 2000
- Messages
- 493
Haven't heard from Clay recently also. Maybe they were left behind in the old forums. 
Gollnick
Musical Director
- Joined
- Mar 22, 1999
- Messages
- 29,258
Ok, I'm back
When Spark loaded the new software, it shut me out. You see, the new software requires users to accept cookies in order to "log in" in order to post and so forth. Well, I refuse to accept cookies.
For those of you who aren't aware of them, cookies is a facility in HTML that allows a web site to create, write to, and read from a file on your disk. This is an obvious threat to your system's security.
Cookies (as the playful name suggests) were orginally created during a more innocent time on the internet, back when we were all just a bunch of cliquish technonerd geeks playing around with our computers and concerns about privacy and security were the farthest thing from anybody's mind. Cookies were a great idea. You didn't have to enter you user name and pass word with every post you made on the forum site since the site could create a cookie on your disk that had that information in it and then just read that file everytime you posted. How handy.
I grew up in a small town. I know that the R.F.D. in Mayberry R.F.D. (and some of you here are to young to remember that. Some of you aren't from these parts either. Mayberry R.F.D. was the small town in a popular TV show when I was a boy) stands for Rural Fire Districe. We were one too. In my home town, you didn't have to fumble with car keys each time you wanted to start your car. You could just leave the keys in the ignition. Nobody would think of stealing your car. The internet was like that at one time. You didn't have to be concerned about privacy and security.
Today, I live in the Portland, Oregon area. If you leave your keys in your car, chances are you'll soon have no car.
The internet has become a big city and there are people out there with different goals and intensions, people who don't share the original vision of the internet and the web but see it was a tool to advance their own goals and agendas. These people have taken advantage of the cookie and perverted to their own use.
What use? Simple, they use cookies to track your online activities. They keep track of what sites you've visited, where you came to those sites, what you did on those sites, how long you looked at those sites, and where you went from those sites.
Right now, their goal is, what else?, advertising. If they look at where you've been and see that you've been looking at car sites, they might conclude that you're interested in buying a car. So, the next banner ad you see will be from a car manufacturer. They're trying to target advertising.
Targeting advertising isn't necessarily a bad thing in-and-of itself. But, just last year the major company that does this, doubleclick.com, announced that they were going to team up with another company that attempts to build profiles of consumers by name based on their buying patterns, a company called Arbitron Data Systems (and we can talk at length some time about this invasion of privacy, but it's another thread), to try and build even more accurate even more detailed dossiers of every person in America. Fortunately, privacy advocates persuaded these two companies to voluntarily abandon those efforts for now.
A lot of paranoid folks fear that the CIA is spying on them. Well, in most cases, the CIA is not. But, if you spend money in America, companies like dobuleclick and Arbitron ARE spying on you. Right now, they are spying on you just to advertise to you. The fear I have is the potential for misuse of those databases.
So, I've refused to accept cookies. Aside from the obvious security risk of allowing anyone who runs a website you happen to visit to create, read, and write files on your disk, the modern misuse of cookies now makes them a serious risk to your privacy and security.
Now, please understand that I don't think that Spark or bladeforums.com is trying to compromise my security or privacy. These are not the people and the sites I'm worried about.
The problem is that cookies are an on/off switch on browsers. Sure, I could turn the switch on when I visit bladeforums and then turn it off when I head out into the rest of the cruel web. But, what if I forgot? If I drop my guard for bladeforums.com, I could easily forget to put it back up later.
So, fortunately, in researching this, I have found a program called Guard Dog that sort of sits between your browser and your internet connection and that watches cookie activity. Using this software, I can accept cookies from bladeforums.com and block them from other sites.
Unfortunately, this software cost $39. So, I won't be able to buy myself a full membership here at bladeforums.com. Sorry, Spark, but I had to spend my money on cookie filtering software instead of supporting bladeforums.com financially.
But, I am now back.
When Spark loaded the new software, it shut me out. You see, the new software requires users to accept cookies in order to "log in" in order to post and so forth. Well, I refuse to accept cookies.
For those of you who aren't aware of them, cookies is a facility in HTML that allows a web site to create, write to, and read from a file on your disk. This is an obvious threat to your system's security.
Cookies (as the playful name suggests) were orginally created during a more innocent time on the internet, back when we were all just a bunch of cliquish technonerd geeks playing around with our computers and concerns about privacy and security were the farthest thing from anybody's mind. Cookies were a great idea. You didn't have to enter you user name and pass word with every post you made on the forum site since the site could create a cookie on your disk that had that information in it and then just read that file everytime you posted. How handy.
I grew up in a small town. I know that the R.F.D. in Mayberry R.F.D. (and some of you here are to young to remember that. Some of you aren't from these parts either. Mayberry R.F.D. was the small town in a popular TV show when I was a boy) stands for Rural Fire Districe. We were one too. In my home town, you didn't have to fumble with car keys each time you wanted to start your car. You could just leave the keys in the ignition. Nobody would think of stealing your car. The internet was like that at one time. You didn't have to be concerned about privacy and security.
Today, I live in the Portland, Oregon area. If you leave your keys in your car, chances are you'll soon have no car.
The internet has become a big city and there are people out there with different goals and intensions, people who don't share the original vision of the internet and the web but see it was a tool to advance their own goals and agendas. These people have taken advantage of the cookie and perverted to their own use.
What use? Simple, they use cookies to track your online activities. They keep track of what sites you've visited, where you came to those sites, what you did on those sites, how long you looked at those sites, and where you went from those sites.
Right now, their goal is, what else?, advertising. If they look at where you've been and see that you've been looking at car sites, they might conclude that you're interested in buying a car. So, the next banner ad you see will be from a car manufacturer. They're trying to target advertising.
Targeting advertising isn't necessarily a bad thing in-and-of itself. But, just last year the major company that does this, doubleclick.com, announced that they were going to team up with another company that attempts to build profiles of consumers by name based on their buying patterns, a company called Arbitron Data Systems (and we can talk at length some time about this invasion of privacy, but it's another thread), to try and build even more accurate even more detailed dossiers of every person in America. Fortunately, privacy advocates persuaded these two companies to voluntarily abandon those efforts for now.
A lot of paranoid folks fear that the CIA is spying on them. Well, in most cases, the CIA is not. But, if you spend money in America, companies like dobuleclick and Arbitron ARE spying on you. Right now, they are spying on you just to advertise to you. The fear I have is the potential for misuse of those databases.
So, I've refused to accept cookies. Aside from the obvious security risk of allowing anyone who runs a website you happen to visit to create, read, and write files on your disk, the modern misuse of cookies now makes them a serious risk to your privacy and security.
Now, please understand that I don't think that Spark or bladeforums.com is trying to compromise my security or privacy. These are not the people and the sites I'm worried about.
The problem is that cookies are an on/off switch on browsers. Sure, I could turn the switch on when I visit bladeforums and then turn it off when I head out into the rest of the cruel web. But, what if I forgot? If I drop my guard for bladeforums.com, I could easily forget to put it back up later.
So, fortunately, in researching this, I have found a program called Guard Dog that sort of sits between your browser and your internet connection and that watches cookie activity. Using this software, I can accept cookies from bladeforums.com and block them from other sites.
Unfortunately, this software cost $39. So, I won't be able to buy myself a full membership here at bladeforums.com. Sorry, Spark, but I had to spend my money on cookie filtering software instead of supporting bladeforums.com financially.
But, I am now back.
- Joined
- Oct 8, 1998
- Messages
- 8,917
All of your statements are very true. But I have a question for you.
If a very crafty and nefarious Internet Roach decided to really come after you (not advertising, but with malice) could they launch a counterfeit fabrication that mimics the Bladeforums "HIT" to get by Guard Dog?
- Joined
- Mar 6, 2001
- Messages
- 791
I know a few "old school" hackers who have now gone down the straight and narrow. I've heard them talking about "eating cookies" and programs like "cookie monster". It's the first thing online baddies go for. Unfortunately, the more automated people want to make their sites, the bigger the cookie. Bigger cookie = more sensitive info. Credit card info, address, and all sorts of nasty things. Sometimes when you goto "logged in" pages, and it doesn't load properly (bad server, general error), you may even see your password sitting in the address bar. Scary. The technology is growing faster than the means to control and secure it. And we somehow feel safe in the fact that we're monitoring our software security with more software. A program is a program, and it can always be sidestepped or destroyed. And don't think the government is helping any of this. All they seem to be able to do is put court ordered "black boxes" on the lines of ISPs when they feel there is a specific crime going on. Not just to up security. Even then, collecting information from ISP's is no easier than getting a phone tap.
Frankly, the term "The Information Age" is somewhat frightening to me.
Frankly, the term "The Information Age" is somewhat frightening to me.
Gollnick
Musical Director
- Joined
- Mar 22, 1999
- Messages
- 29,258
Of course.
Security is always that way. For every move, there is a counter-move. And for every counter-move, there is another counter-move.
This points out another really good reason to be very, very concerned about cookies. People other than those who created them can read them back. So, even if you trust the site that you're allowing to establish a cookie on your computer, you still need to be very concerned about what they're putting into that cookie. All someone needs to know is the name of the cookie file, and then they can read it too. Since sites use the same name for the cookie file on every PC on which they establish a cookie, that name is not hard to figure out.
Consider what I could do if I becomes aware that a certain online knife catalog site was trying to make shopping more convenient for its customers by making a cookie file on the customer's disk with the customer's name, address, and credit card data so that the customer doesn't have to enter that with every order. If I could figure out the name of the file they use (and that would be trivial, just visit the site myself and look for the new file on my disk) then I could add code to my site to check the disk of every person who visits my site to see if that cookie was there and, if so, to read it. My victims would never even know that I'd read the file. In fact, unless they're very computer savvy, they'd probably never figure out how I'd gotten ahold of their information.
And, if that's not enough to really get you worried, consider this: I can claim that any file on your computer is my cookie and, therefore, read and write it. What I can't do is get a directory of your disk. But, I often don't need that. Many programs these days store specific files in standardized locations. So, my site could simply claim that your browser history file is my cookie and read it. Now I know everywhere you've surfed in, typically, the last thirty days. I could claim your e-mail inbox as my cookie and read it.
Allowing unrestricted cookie access on your computer is a real risk to your security and privacy. So, I'm happy that I got Guard Dog. It's not perfect, I'm sure, but it does offer some protection.
I used to work in the military/industrial sector. The computers we used to do our work were simply not on the internet. There is no way to fully secure a computer with an internet connection. If we needed to use the internet, we had to go to another building (the building in which we worked did not have any network connection physically in it to simply elliminate the potential of any accidental connection) and use a different PC. The only way to get information from the internet to our working computer was to print it out and then type it back in, no cut-and-paste, no FTP, no e-mail it over, no putting it on a disk or tape, just print it out and type it back in.