[RFB Watching You (ineptly)] Re: Does anyone think this will be fixed?

["T. V. Raman" <raman@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Out of curiousity I took a look to see why RFB's  server was
breaking -- it's not a pleasant discovery.

Of course one should attribute all misdeeds to ineptitude
rather than malice but ...

0) Their search engine now depends on cookies.
--when you do the one shot search from Emacspeak it doesn't
get a cookie --for obvious reasons --
and since their search script was written using
fragile/broken technology it throws and error and shows you
the script error!

But wait, it gets even better.

1) Go there with W3 and you'll see a huge pile of invalid
   html --badly escaped javascript inside attributes.
Worse, if you set w3 up not to send out personal information
   like your email, the site comes back and claims you dont
   have cookies working --this is untrue and (probably)
   intentionally misleading.

Summary:

If RFB really wanted to see if their members were searching
for books, they should set up a user id and login --not
secretly track things 

I will now stop using RFB on principle until they fix this
or explain themselves.

-- 
Best Regards,
--raman

      
Email:  raman@xxxxxxxxxxx
WWW: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/raman/             
PGP:    http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/raman/raman.asc 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe from the emacspeak list or change your address on the
emacspeak list send mail to "emacspeak-request@xxxxxxxxxxx" with a
subject of "unsubscribe" or "help"