I can't believe that after all those years I didn't see that until you pointed it out. Wow. I always thought the 360 was some kind of reference to the Nintendo Revolution. Maybe it was too. It seems they were quite happy to give a subtle not to their competitors at the time.

I used to block advertisers, now I'm laughing at them.

If Gandhi's quote applies then I don't like where this is going.

git

Come on, he said so himself ;)

Is that true? That's the exact thing that was conspicuously absent from the article, which is why it seemed so odd.

MS had quite a catchy name there. I do find it odd that the article said nothing about Sky Broadcasting having a trademark on (or even using) "SkyDrive" - it seems that they're claiming ownership over anything with the word "sky" in it, and that MS is conceding. Yikes.

No, I was referring to the standard as specified 5 months before IE10 came to be

That happened last year, but it was only for a month. The patch to disregard DNT from IE was actually made by one of the authors of the DNT standard in response to IE catastrophically mutilating the standard, but they soon decided that messing with Apache wasn't appropriate and reverted the patch.

Panama Canal, Central America: 2,193 Miles South of the REAL America

I got a valid certificate verified by Thawte.

Anyone writing a javascript application should know to add a <noscript> tag to the page embedding the scripts.

<noscript><p>This page is built using Javascript, but it seems that you have Javascript disabled on your browser. Please enable Javascript and refresh this page to continue.</p></noscript>

I think that's a much more robust approach. The user understands what's going on, and you don't have to rely on every browser preventing Javascript from being disabled.

Now that's interesting - I didn't know about IE9's tracking protection, or that it let you subscribe to blocklists. Thanks for sharing.

That's the thing. We'd all like not to be tracked. Well, most of us, at least. However DNT does not control whether or not you are tracked - it merely conveys whether the user has specifically asked not to be tracked (or to be tracked, in the case of DNT: 0). This is useful because it is a necessary component in other means to stop tracking. For example, some countries might manage to get a law passed forbidding tracking unless the user has opted in, in which case a DNT:0 request header could be a convenient legal requirement for tracking. Another place might pass a law forbidding tracking users who have opted out. This would be difficult because how would you know if someone has opted out without some degree of tracking? Well, looking for a DNT:1 header would do the trick. Another situation would be if some privacy-motivated coalition negotiated a deal with major advertisers where the advertisers wouldn't track users that send a DNT:1 header provided that browsers don't send DNT:1 by default.

Now, what are the effects of IE's approach? First off, that deal actually managed to happened, but it broke down because IE send DNT:1 by default. The other two cases are hypothetical.

If it were law that tracking someone who has opted out of tracking is illegal, and an advertiser is caught tracking IE users who send DNT:1 the advertiser could argue that they have no reason to believe that the user has opted out at all, and point to the fact that IE sends DNT:1 regardless of whether the user has asked not to be tracked - and that the only users who don't send DNT:1 are those who edited the setting from the default and explicitly asked requested their browser NOT to request no tracking. Someone who asked not to be tracked would have DNT:1, but someone who didn't would ordinarily be sending DNT:1 too, and there's no way tell the difference - but some statistics could be provided showing that the majority of users don't try to opt out of tracking and therefore DNT:1 headers correlate mainly with users who did not opt out (and if the browser says otherwise then it is simply lying). They might go to court and they might lose that argument, but there's also a rather good chance that they would win it and become exempt from having to respect DNT headers, assuming they even get caught in the first place.

If it were law that tracking requires opt in, they could easily argue that lack of opt-out qualifies as opt-in for the same reason as above - that the user went out of his way to specifically not ask not to be tracked. Thus consent is implied even if there is no DNT header at all.

The DNT header is meant to be a way to indicate whether the user has opted in or out. IE opting out on the users behalf unless they specifically asked for tracking to be allowed gives slimy advertisers the opportunity to claim that apparent opting out implies not opting out, and that not opting in or out implies opting in - leaving nothing at all to imply actually opting out.

Microsoft's decision does absolutely nothing to block tracking (actual blocking - as opposed to DNT requests - is the topic of TFA in fact); all it does is remove any way for a user to unambiguously opt out.

If you really don't want to be tracked then we need 2 things: a law that compels advertisers to respect opt-ins and opt-outs, and for browsers not to send fake opt-outs on behalf of the users. If Microsoft actually wants to protect users from tracking then it should look into blocking trackers like Mozilla is doing here, and informing users that they can opt out of tracking instead of doing so automatically and leaving users with only the option of stopping the opt-in requests.

I recommend configuring your browser to keep cookies only until you close your browser. This is quite easy to do in Firefox - go to the options, in the Privacy tab, and under the checkbox for whether to accept cookies there's a dropdown labelled "Keep until:". Set that to "Keep until: I close Firefox". Then you can grab something like Cookie Monster to make it easy to whitelist those site where you do want persistent cookies. Which browser are you using, by the way?

That's interesting, and certainly a fair decision on their part. Out of curiosity, is there a way for those of us in countries without software patents to reenable the MPEG-2 hardware decoder?

Now we have a second Second Cold War.

Let's not fight about it - if the argument itself develops into a cold war we'd have the first Second Second Cold War Cold War, which would be terrible. And you know there'd inevitably be another one after that.