If your environment is so 'highly managed', why are you allowing Tracking
(Third-party) cookies at all? They are completely unnecessary to the access
or operation of anything but the Tracking web sites themselves. I've never
ever had anyone show me that a Tracking cookie was required to access a site.
Only First-party cookies have this distinction.
This is why Internet Explorer 6 and up allows you to completely block all
Third-party Tracking cookies and separately decide how to handle First-party
cookies; Allow, Block or Prompt. With this setting and one last clearing of
all [Tracking] cookies, you'll never again save a Tracking cookie, so
removing them with another tool is absolutely unnecessary since there won't
be any.
If you can't see from this why cookie removal via scanning and 'cleaning' is
a totally pointless waste of time and effort, I can't help you, nor can
anyone.
Bitman
:
Guys,
The whole point is this:
Tracking cookies do what? They track! The give their creators a way to track
your surfing habits. Is that not an invasion of your privacy? Yes, it is.
Therefore, it's a form a spying on you without your knowledge. Flat out, a
tracking cookie is spyware and needs to be scanned for and removed.
You can argue this and that about using IE to handle cookies, but in many
environments, not only is that incredibly tidious, but just not feasible. My
user base has highly managed pc's, but outside of the company proxy, they
are permitted to surf websites that many other companies block. Why you
say? For some companies, this is called work-life balance and as a human
resource directive, it's not something I can fight.
I need a complete spyware product that will also scan for these spying
cookies. Windows defender has a lot of promise, but for Microsoft not to
acknowledge that these cookies are potentially harmful (even resulting in
increased spam on the Exchange servers, is absolutely ludicrous and
careless.
Microsoft is pretty close on this one as far as I'm concerned, but if they
choose to igbore an area that has potential for harm, I'll have to recommend
to our directors that we go elsewhere for a product that will. I'll continue
to test it and hope for the best that they'll eventually see a need for
this.
:
Hi Bitman
What I mean you sees them within for example a Ewido scan log.........
Sex trackers, Botnet trackers and so on.
You can directly see what sort of users it is out of
a Ewido scan log.
So for me 3rd party cookies are "junk".
A "braindead" technology.
Just use them as "first party" needed cookie
everything else is something the ads industry
invented and they must create new business models.
IMHO
regards
plun
Plun,
The HijackThis forums I frequent don't waste their time on cookies, so I'm
not sure what you're referring to. I have seen you mentiion something
about malware purveyors using cookies to track infected machines, but
I've never been certain what your concern is, since the infection itself
and what allowed it on the PC in the first place would be mine.
I'm also not certain why you've had problems with the IE Third-party
cookie blocking, since mine has always worked flawlessly. No cookie I've
blocked has ever been written to the PC including Third-party or
First-party using Prompt, unless I have clicked 'Allow' in haste by
mistake.
On this site, using either IE 6 or 7, I'm consistently blocking a
Third-party Tracking cookie from 'm.webtrends.com' which I double-checked
and confirmed by looking in both the cookies and Temporary Internet files
folders.
I'm not certain what is causing you to be unable to block these correctly.
Is it possible you haven't cleared out the existing cookies after changing
them to Block? This is a known issue with IE 6 that may still affect IE 7,
I haven't tested it myself.
Inability to properly Block Third-party cookies is a well known issue with
Firefox, often mentioned in the Spybot S&D forums, but once configured to
Block Third-party Tracking cookies I've never heard the same complaint for
Internet Explorer.
Bitman
:
Hi Bitman
Within every HijackThis forum you can see how well
cookie handling works.
With IE7 it´s better but still leaves openings.
MS uses 3rd party cookies themselves within these newsgroups.
And they passes with IE7.........????
There is no need for "cocknuts" and ads.......
regards
plun
Blocking all Third-party cookies with Internet Explorer 6 or 7 has never
caused me any issues with browsing. I use the Privacy tab, Advanced
button, 'Override default cookie handling' setting to Block Third-party
cookies, which I would assume has an equivalent Group Policy setting.
This creates no pop-ups or other changes to what the user sees, so
it's a perfect way to avoid ever having to deal with these again.
Removing these after the fact is basically a waste of time, since they
already performed their function during the user's browsing session.
You can still leave First-party cookies set to Allow, which doesn't
change anything in regards to cookies that affect site access or
experience. I prefer to Prompt for these, but that can create a fair
amount of requests to allow or block, especially shortly after the
change.
The above abilities are the reason that cookies are ignored by Defender
and likely always will be.
Bitman
:
Tom,
That's not what I'm asking. I'm panning to deploy this in the
workplace and I have to treat every user as if they know absolutely
nothing about the maintenance and security of their PC. I do not wish
to set up IE to block a bunch of cookies as it detracts from much of
it's functionality. Besides, we have a proxy server that does a
pretty good job of keeping them off of websites that land those types
of cookies on their PC's. There are some, however, that get through
and those are the ones I'd like to see scannned and removed by the
product. If the anti-spyware cannot scan these, it's not as
effective as it could be.
IE6 and IE7 (which I am Beta testing) do not have a way to scan for
tracking cookies. If other anti-spyware programs can do it, certainly
Microsoft in all of it's infinite software engineering can devise a
way to do the same.
Thanks for the reply though.
Will
:
Hi Will,
cookies are well handled in IE6 and even better in IE7, so look there
to handle these cookies in the "Internet Options".
Regards >*< TOM >*<
Will Rosensteel schreef:
I'm not sure that this is the place to post general suggestions, so
please fell free to redirect me if this is the case.
I would like to see an area improved in Windows Defender that it is
sorely lacking and that's it's non-existant ability to scan cookies
and eliminate tracking cookies.
Ever since Microsoft Anti-Spyware was introduced, I've always had to
rely on Lavasoft Ad-Aware installed as well. It never finds
anything else on my PC, but everytime I run it after a few hours
on the net, it always finds a couple of tracking cookies to
eliminate. Windows Defender "NEVER" scans for these and removes
them.
It would be a nice addition for those of us seeking to have a more
complete solution from one product.
Otherwise, I'm real happy with the new design.
I was thinking about using Windows Defender in our work environment
since we'll be able to install it and manage it over group policy
once the final is released
