Cookies, anyone?
Dvorak is calling for the outright banning of cookies. He always tries to lean a little bit past the mainstream in the name of being controversial. Which is good for circulation, I guess, but really does nothing to solve the problem.
About a year ago–during the lead-up to the passing of the anti-spam bill–I wrote an article with a slightly different take on cookies.
It just seems to me that writing a cookie protocol would be too easy. Set the browser to first and foremost reject any cookie that isn’t compliant with the protocol. Then cookies can be identified according to type and dealt with according to a rules-based system based on cookie type.
Cookies are a serious problem if you have any concerns about individual privacy. More importantly, the blatant win-at-all-costs attitude of the marketers needs to be checked.
Furthermore, as an aside, is hyper-consumerism really in our best interest? Buying all this crap we dont really need is as much a cause of the two-worker family as is over-regulation and over-taxation.