The Success Disaster of the Cookie

[rejectconvenience]

I decided to read public chat logs from 1995 (the research process for this video was insane)

Link to the video
https://youtu.be/EHkSJ8N3JnI

Description:
Cookies sure do be wild

The World Wide Web was made for all of us! @LuvstarKei has an amazing art-focused website collection site that you should 100% check out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JINpo4ZoH7U
(here’s the link to the site: https://starsubculture.com)

▬▬ References ▬▬
CERN World Wide Web proposal from 1989: https://web.archive.org/web/20100401051 ... posal.html
Tim Jackson, “This bug in your pc is a smart cookie,” Financial Times Feb 12 1996 (Page 31): https://ia800607.us.archive.org/24/item ... 8en%29.pdf
HTTP Cookies: Standards, Privacy, and Politics by David M. Kristol: https://arxiv.org/pdf/cs/0105018
HTTP State Management Mechanism (rfc2109): https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2109
Giving Web a Memory Cost Its Users Privacy by John Schwartz: https://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/04/busi ... ivacy.html
Attention Shoppers: Internet Is Open by Peter H. Lewis (Sting CD purchase): https://www.nytimes.com/1994/08/12/busi ... -open.html
BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY; A Free and Simple Computer Link by John Markoff (regarding the rise of the Mosaic browser): https://www.nytimes.com/1993/12/08/busi ... -link.html
An example of online shopping before the World Wide Web protocol: https://www.deseret.com/1995/3/6/191627 ... ovel-idea/
What is a third party cookie: https://www.ketch.com/blog/posts/what-i ... rty-cookie
Internet Explorer comes out of nowhere: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3T-Nx-fwNY
AOL buys Netscape for $10,000,000,000: https://web.archive.org/web/20171107021 ... spx?id=741
Netscape to Mozilla pipeline: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation
Interviews with Lou Montulli (the inventory of the cookie):
Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwvKew15o0c
Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLpgX6ZEocE
Signal president article: https://www.wired.com/story/meredith-whittaker-signal/
Link if you don’t want to pay for wired for the above article: viewtopic.php?t=42

▬▬ Resources ▬▬
https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/
https://www.pcjs.org/software/pcx86/sys ... /4.00.950/
https://guidebookgallery.org/index
https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/web-des ... ities-1994

Fingerprinting resources:
https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/about
https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/kcarter
https://www.amiunique.org/faq
https://www.amiunique.org/privacy-tools/


▬▬ Credit and Special Thanks ▬▬
Audio production by [lý]
– https://lyismusic.dk/
– https://www.instagram.com/ly_is_music

▬▬ Licenses and Attributions ▬▬
"90's Computer" by Cameron-Main – https://skfb.ly/6XP9r – License: Attribution 4.0

▬▬ Timestamps ▬▬
00:00 Intro
00:25 Genesis of the World Wide Web
03:16 Persistent Client State Objects
06:40 Behold, the Internet Cookie!
08:50 One Small Oversight
11:16 Consequential Compromise
15:00 Annihilation of the First Mosaic Killer
16:16 The Devil We Don’t Know
18:14 Perks to an Open Standard

[JINSBEK]

Hey, just saw the video! I love the bump in the production and creativity! Sound design’s pretty important to me, and how you illustrated the ecommerce storefronts and transactions is great. Very fascinating history of the development of the cookie, and ecommerce in general. I’m surprised you didn’t go into evercookies (cookies respawned from the dead via JavaScript necromancy). So, even if you do delete a cookie, the most committed advertisers (and government trackers) probably will just put it on your browser again.

I am impressed by the foresight of the original Netscape team, at such young ages. The web sure was a wild and wondrous place back then! It’s hard to replicate that excitement of doing something totally new and really cool, something that could affect everybody you know and more. You just had to be there. Most people these days will never know why websites specify http:// in their address—they won’t know that back then, they had to tell their browser what kind of website they were loading. There are still a few enthusiasts making and maintaining gopher:// websites to this day. Odd, neat thing.

For anyone more interested in digital fingerprinting, here’s a good lecture on it from MozCon 2014. Obviously, it’s dated now, but it should still give a good idea of what’s possible with this information.

One more thing, your timestamps/chapters are very thoughtful. Thank you!

[CitricScion]

Awesome video, and handy reminder to check that I have third party cookies blocked!

I gotta say, not only is your animation great, but your writing and presentation are top tier. Your videos have so much polish! You do a great job of breaking down complicated topics into layman's terms. They feel like documentaries compared to most other videos I watch.

I want other digital privacy focused YouTube channels to come across you!

[rejectconvenience]

Thanks @JINSBEK and @CitricScion!! I really had a lot of fun making it, and I'm really happy most people seem to like it.

I do eventually want to do a deeper dive into fingerprinting, that feels like a topic on it's own - but if I do, I want to be able to at least offer solutions, which at this moment, I don't have yet. It'll take time, but it's worth looking into!

Also thanks for noticing the timestamps haha I spent way too long on those

[JINSBEK]

Yeah!! Just nine hours and already 144 comments on it? That’s amazing, man. Keep up the good work!

And timestamps are hard but very important, haha. I used to subtitle/closed caption Japanese media with English captions, so. SRT files. Man.

[TheGreatTurtlexP]

I feel like the people here would like this https://www.privacytools.io/

[JINSBEK]

I think this is relevant...

cookies.png (46 KiB) Viewed 42 times

cookies2.png (72.31 KiB) Viewed 42 times

I find it funny that the video gives an example of “10 websites sharing cookies”, but. It’s really multiple orders of magnitude greater than that. Not a criticism of the video, and I think it’d be insane to ask you to model and animate 1,000 different e-commerce sites at once, I just don’t think people really understand what’s at stake here…

[rejectconvenience]

I had to keep it simple, but yeah, it's cursed how many of these there can be