Re: NS, Verisign, Firefly proposal [was Re: Revised charter ,

Larry Masinter:
>
>I'm sorry for having quoted the newspaper article, but I
>was just using it as further evidence that attempts to
>schedule a revision of 2109 that dealt with any changes
>to the cookie privacy issue inside the HTTP working group
>would be unlikely to get credible community consensus,
>since the parties involved in the press release don't
>seem to be active members of the discussion.

I agree completely.  Making a new spec to replace the privacy
infrastructure in 2109 could take a long time, and it may need another
WG.

>I'm wondering if we might avoid some of the difficulties
>if we issued an update (rather than a replacement) to
>2109 that only dealt with the set-cookie2 difficulty.

For the realistig WG milestones, I am only looking for an update (with
set-cookie2 and maybe some wording improvements) to 2109, not a
replacement.

As for the NETSCAPE, VERISIGN, FIREFLY hype: I think this thing is an
exercise in media manipulation.  I find it very significant that they
are doing the press release before releasing the actual spec.  This
means that the media cannot ask the techical community for some
comments on how good the spec is, and that, by the time the technical
community has read the spec, any (negative) comments won't be printed
in the mass media because it is `old news'.

As far as I am able to determine now, the spec is for sending
`business cards' to sites, something which cannot be done in a
standard way now.  The privacy protection comes in because you get the
option _not_ to send your business card.  Great.  This whole thing
does nothing to improve the privacy issues related to cookies.

I could say more bad things about it, but this list isn't really the
place.  See http://www.wired.com/news/business/story/4102.html for
some good reporting about it.

Koen.

Received on Friday, 30 May 1997 02:23:23 UTC