I’m not an overly paranoid person and think some of the people who feel the need to delete their cookies regularly are probably taking things just a little too far. If people are tracking me around the web and serving adverts I might actually be interested in - fair play to them! I have nothing to hide and nothing to worry about.

However I didn’t realise that Flash provides a much more dangerous type of cookie that really needs to be addressed.

This Local Shared Object can:

• Stay on your computer for an unlimited amount of time
• Store 100 kb of data by default, with an unlimited max
• Couldn’t be deleted by your browser
• Send previous visit information and history, by default, without your permission

The big thing I take exception to here are the last two points. Firstly I believe every technology should give the user the ability to opt out, for cookies the option to delete should be readily available even if for the most part it’s only used by a minority. But the second point is truly wrong - this kind of data should be limited as it is in other technologies such as JavaScript.

Come on Adobe just give an opt out button on the next version of Flash player or perhaps just make security settings a little easier to find for your average user?

Well he isn’t actually but it’s a similar sort of headline that was taken seriously and reported by CNN. It would seem a blog reported Mr Jobs (High godness of Apple) had a heart attack and CNN broadcast this causing a drop in Apple’s share price.

A little bit irresponsible of CNN not to get this confirmed after all don’t believe everything you read online. It would also seem there are investigations to see if this story was published with the intention of pushing down the share price.

I’ve been looking very hard recently at jQuery as it seems to provide such a useful lightweight toolkit. My background is Microsoft .net and I have been using the ASP.NET AJAX framework but jQuery has been on my radar because the buzz online about it is huge and it just seems to do some great stuff so easily that would fit in well with the AJAX features.

Well looks like Microsoft (and Nokia) have been keeping a close eye too as they’ve announced they’re going to make jQuery part of the official development platform. Excellent news and I’ll certainly be using jQuery in the very near future.

I’ve been meaning to post this for a while but a certain screaming baby has been occupying a lot of my time.

 A few weeks ago it was Google’s 10th birthday and they’ve made available the oldest index they still have so take a trip back in time to January 2001. It’s really interesting to see the results for some search terms - iPod doesn’t relate to anything Apple at all!

1,326,920,000 pages? Not a lot on current standards is it?