March 22, 2008 at 12:37AM On Karlin Lillington’s “The EU’s odd priorities”
Karlin Lillington recently wrote some inaccurate nonsense for the Irish Times on the EU’s approval of Google’s DoubleClick purchase. I posted a comment correcting some misinformation it contained. Here it is. Bits in italic are things I forgot when I posted the original comment.
Er, no Karlin. There’s worrying aspects to the merger, but I think you’re way off the mark: “Google’s Trojan Horse: Let the Free Ad Serving Begin”.
On IE vs. Safari, the big difference is that IE is hardwired into the underlying OS, whereas Safari isn’t. MacOS works just fine with or without Safari. The other big problem was with the way that MS’s products used unpublished Windows APIs to give them an advantage in the market over those of third parties. Not that Apple are completely clean in this regard.
And where did you get the idea that MS have been releasing code as open source? They’ve released very little as open source (the likes of WIX and WTL being minor exceptions). Are you sure you’re not thinking of their “Shared Source” Initiative? That’s the umbrella under which MS make the source selected libraries, products, or section thereof openly viewable, but not usable or forkable. For instance, take the release of the source for the .NET foundation libraries. The source was released purely as a reference. A project like Mono can’t use any of this code under any circumstances whatsoever. There’s nothing wrong with MS’s Shared Source Initiative other than its slightly deceptive name, and it’s to be lauded, but it’s most definitely not to be confused with Libre software.
A cookie is not a program--it does not execute. It’s a bit of information that the webserver sends to a browser that the browser then sends back unaltered.
As it happens, it’s quite easy to block most DoubleClick cookies, at least in browsers other than IE. For instance, there are Firefox plugins that specifically block advertising content from being fetched (e.g., Adblock). And even without them, most modern browsers allow cookies from certain domains to be blacklisted. This might be non-trivial as it requires you to know what a cookie really is and where to find the configuration panel, but it’s far from impossible.