Huh? Why would you even say such a thing?

Read the comments on the original story. No law was broken. Period. A very minor technical error of a guideline – not a law. Was it a stupid error? Probably. Could it have been avoided? Certainly. Is it in any way illegal? NO.

Please at least read the comments. The one person shouting the loudest about it being a violation of law later admitted that it WAS NOT.

A tiny bit of critical reading, folks. Please.

I’m not sure how that would work. The library needs to know who has what books checked out and when they are due back. Anonymous credit cards? Use cash and coins. Write an IOU and don’t sign it. Start Anonymous Express and issue credit cards without names. Maybe it the next big thing in banking.
I get the feeling we are all being turned into numbers for the sake of transactions or some marketing gimmick. Everything that counts can’t be counted.

This seems like the library records paranoia.

Seems like the place to mention my suggestion of anonymous library cards (with a possible extension to credit cards):
Anonymous Library Cards

Privacy is not always because of concerns over govenment snooping, but may be a reaction to private firms just knowing too much about us. I’ve stopped using amazon.com because their “customer relationship management” software is just too intrusive.
Just because I looked up a book for some random reason once, doesn’t mean I want to be reminded of it evey time I log in.

Top Five 2005 Stories the MSM hated

(Below are excerpts from an excellent article by Steve Feinstein)
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles.php?article_id=5117

5. The Michael Steele garbage-dump scavenger hunt

If the two parties’ roles had been reversed, Ms. Pelosi’s outraged howls complaining of the Republicans’ “Culture of Corruption” would have reached new heights.

At the time, Steele said he would press the matter, but the story got absolutely no traction in the mainstream news and was quickly forgotten. The story was AWOL in the New York Times.

4. The trial of Saddam Hussein

one of humanity’s most heinous offenders, yet coverage of the proceedings against him is reported in an almost excuse-me, second-section manner.

…It’s as if the MSM is afraid that with an accurate presentation of Saddam’s crimes, set within the proper larger context of the significance of the trial, the MSM will give legitimacy to both the notion of regime change in Iraq and the larger War on Terror, something they clearly do not wish to do.

3. The U.N. Oil-for-Food Scandal and Kofi Annan’s [non-] Resignation

That no one has been held fully accountable for the slipshod, sloppy, incompetent, almost-certainly-criminal manner in which the greatest amount of money in the history of humanitarian efforts ended up in the pockets of people for whom it was clearly not intended is, indeed, a top-five Story of the Year. As quickly as each piece of this sordid puzzle came to light, that’s how quickly the liberal media quashed it for fear of exposing the U.N.’s corruption, powerlessness, anti-American bias, and irrelevance.

If the oil-for-food scandal had forced Annan into a humiliating resignation, the President’s position would be proven to be incontrovertibly correct, much to the chagrin of the fawning, liberal, international-approval faction.

2. The Great Economy

Yet in an effort to deny the President (and by extension, the Republican-controlled House and Senate) any credit whatsoever, the MSM continually ignores the excellent economic big picture. Instead, they seemingly attempt to portray all good economic news in vague, ambiguous light. The New York Times said on 12/27/05,

“Though final results for the holidays will not be available for several weeks, analysts and retail executives are projecting a respectable [6% increase] but not stunning season.”

Considering that gasoline prices shot up to over $3.00 per gallon after Katrina and consumer sentiment at the time fell just as quickly, the idea that the nation’s retailers would even enjoy a “respectable” holiday season seemed far-fetched in September. But to the Times and other MSM outlets, Republican economics are always a glass half-empty proposition. Interestingly, the 12/27 Wall Street Journal Online edition reported that Christmas sales increased a very strong 8.7% over the previous year, the same day the Times chose to grudgingly characterize sales as merely “respectable.”

1. Positive Progress in both Iraq and the War on Terror

Hussein is gone. His WMD threat—whether giving them to anti-U.S. terrorists or building more sophisticated delivery systems with which to attack his neighbors again—is gone. The U.S. and the world are safer. The Middle East is more stable. The Iraqi people have voted successfully three times since January, to the apparent but undeniable disappointment of the liberal media and those leading the Democratic Party opposition to President Bush. The Iraqi economy is growing rapidly. Newspapers and television stations are flourishing. The vast majority of the Iraqi people are optimistic about their future, as they embrace democracy and emerge from decades of oppression.

Yet the MSM and the Democratic Party both find themselves reduced to fixating on arbitrary numbers of U.S. war casualties and actually highlighting American military setbacks, all the while transparently claiming to “support the troops.” It seems as if that’s their entire contribution to the conduct of the most important foreign-policy initiative in two generations. The importance of—and progress in—the War on Terror is the Number One most misrepresented story of 2005.

But the IP address by itself doesn’t get you anywhere. Most internet service providers give out the IP addresses randomly, and only they know who’s got what IP addresses any given day. And believe you me, they’re not going to let you call up and say, “Hey, who had IP address 192.16.8.0.1 on Tuesday the 2nd of July at 3:00?” if you don’t have a warrant in your hand.

And if you do have a warrant, well, you have a darned good reason to get the info.

So I’m going to chalk this up to more fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Thanks!

This area of study identifies mainstream media not as a source for education but drama — newspapers and the evening news don’t sell “information,” they sell theatre.

There are ten characteristics that create drama in a story; number one on the list is “blame.” The tiniest bit of information (a thunderstorm in the midwest, say) can be frontpage drama if blame (it’s a sign of what happens when Bush won’t comply with Kyoto) can be attached.

The idea that education will eliminate concerns about cookies and traffic counters is based on the presumption that “information” is what the AP is selling in their story. They aren’t — they are selling drama, and the theme isn’t the cookie, it is who put it there. Just like at home, it isn’t the cookie jar that is of interest, it is whose hand is in it.

When the government violates its own rules, and a reporter points that out, how is that naive?

I think it’s a matter of degree. In Pennyslvania, it’s illegal to sleep on top of a refrigerator outdoors. If a member of the Pennsylvania state government was caught doing so and the local media put it in the papers and tried to show how it was another example of the way the Governor flouted the law, I’d think it was someone making a mountain out of a moleholl.

But there’s a lot of fear and paranoia around cookies and other web technologies that just isn’t warranted. The restrictions the OMB put into place for their office are very conservative to begin with. The NSA cookies issue was a quickly corrected mistake that anyone in the tech field could have made (and many companies have — without scrutiny — because they’re not under the magnifying glass the government is). The web tracker being called a “bug” is fearmongering, and the use of that technology isn’t illegal in the first place.

In fact, they are a subject worthy of revisitation by the Citizens Journal Corps.

Speaking of which, check out what Rich Karlgaard says here. Specifically,

Blogs really do threaten the mainstream media. Thought experiment: Suppose you call yourself a pro-technology supply-sider. (That’s what I happen to be, because I think Moore’s Law and Say’s Law drive growth and prosperity in the world.) A reader with such an outlook will find a home at RealClear Politics and Tech Central Station because the editors of those überblogs see the world in the same way. You might ask, “Well, doesn’t the Wall Street Journal see the world likewise?” Yeah, mostly. But the WSJ needs thousands of employees and tons of ink and paper to produce its product. RealClear Politics gets by with fewer than ten employees.

The leftists see an opportunity to garner the support of the ignorant, the audience they count on.

A normal log file contains the date/time of access, the IP address of the browser, the file requested, the status of the request, and (if a link was clicked on or a search engine used) the address or search string used to find the material.

Some people use a third party service to track data (perhaps because they don’t have access to the server host’s log files). This is done by mean of an object on the page which is served from the tracking service as on this site.

So, whether the tracking is visible to the end user or not, the amount of information available is about the same.