Re: IE4 and channels

[hallam () ai mit edu (Phillip Hallam-Baker)]

On Thursday, October 02, 1997 2:14 PM, Jon Cargille [SMTP:jonathan.cargille () CyberSafe COM] wrote:
> The only real question is whether the the logs that are uploaded also
> reveal your IP addr, and I don't know the answer to that question.
> The "Extended Log File Format [W3C-WD-logfile]" that IE uses for the
> logs certainly _supports_ client ip-addr as one of the fields in the
> log, but is by no means a _required_ field.  So, the logs that are
> being uploaded may be innocuous in that regard (I haven't checked).
> If not, that would be an issue.

I wrote the W3C logfile draft, if you look at the archives you will note it
has two sisters, a session ID draft and a logfile exchange scheme
for demographic data.

The drafts were written after a conference on demographic data for
the explicit purpose of facilitating limited exchange of information
to facillitate payment for content.

The reason why I was concerned is that without such schemes sites
are forced to use cache busting techniques to increas their income,
they cannot know how many exposures they get through a cache
so they bust it. To do otherwise costs them income - hard to justify
if like all online content you are loosing money.

I'm fully aware of the privacy issues etc and I believe that in the long
term P3 will be a big advance for everyone. The problem I had to deal
with was very short term however. - it still took almost 2 years for
this to reach product, the development of the Web moves at a glacial
pace.

If Microsoft are uploading a field I would hope it would be the
statistically unique session Id I describe. This is unique for each
site but does not need stupid cookies to track a person through
a site. The cookies are cryptographically formed making it
impossible to correlate them across site except by exporting
them through a URL of some sort.

                Phill