Standard Mischief

A ways back. I wrote a little HowTo on zeroing out and then protecting the perpetual cookie that Google likes to give you. The idea behind using the same cookie as myself, iMilly, and a bunch of other people is that by sharing a cookie, Google would find it that much harder to aggregate all your search data into a nosy little profile. Well you can forget about all that. About the time Google broke the news of a slowdown in the click rate of their ads, they started sending us with the zero cookie people over to this 403 error page.

I don’t know if the two are related, but I have said in the past that if Google ever tries to target ads based on their consumers who are savvy enough to do a little mischief with their cookie, well, I can be pretty sure that those users would block those ads too.

I’d like to propose a workaround. Since Google has decided to block our agreed upon zero cookie, I say we all just agree to use another one. Feel free to use this one (fetched via the always awesome cURL):

Added cookie PREF="ID=bce8f3f9e5dce73e:TM=1206810267:LM=1206810267:S=F9QPv3nrV4NpDJsu" for domain google.com, path /, expire 1269882267

Quickie step by step for Firefox:

1. Download and install Firefox extensions Add N Edit Cookies and CookieCuller.
2. Visit Google to get the cookie.
3. Use Add N Edit Cookies to change your cookie to the ID shown above.
4. Follow the rest of my HowTo on using CookieCuller and the Firefox preferences to protect your altered Google cookie, and any other cookie you deem worthy of keeping around. Remaining cookies will be upchucked when you close Firefox.

So, Consumerist has a post up linking to filife.com, where the writer tried 19 different free services to help you e-file your Federal tax return. There’s only one thing missing in the well written post, There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch, so obviously the corporations offering this deal must be profiting in some way. I’m probably not alone in worrying about exactly how these benevolent businesses are offering such things. I mean, if the profit motive isn’t upfront, I usually figure they’re doing something sneaky.

So are these people data-mining your most personal information, a la Choicepoint, or are they burning through their venture capital trying to build some name recognition? Are they offering a loss-leader hoping to sell you something, or are they getting cash from the IRS for every return they deliver electronically, because that’s easier and cheaper than scanning in the snail mail? Or maybe it’s all four? Inquiring minds want to know.

Most of the services also want to charge you for filing your state return, (but not Turbo Tax and Taxslayer), so that’s one possible angle, but who knows? Don’t think for one minute I’m going to volunteer to read and parse 19 different TACOS (Terms and Conditions of Service).

Meanwhile, I’ll be sending mine in via first class mail.

The story from my host is that the power was cut off to the entire third floor of the place that my host collocates at. Some kind of improperly scheduled maintenance. My site went down sometime early on the ninth of March, Eastern time and has been sporadicly available since then, although this is the first time I’ve been able to login.

This is also why such sites as BugMeNot and RetailMeNot have been offline. Same host.

I’ve been meaning to post my impressions of my host, and now this timely outage. I suppose my synopsis would be: NearlyFreeSpeech.NET great prices, great service, no sluggish oversold shared hosting, no cut-n-paste email tech support, a truly outstanding privacy policy and unfortunately, lately, the hosting uptime of a free dot.bomb webhost.

Arguably, the uptime should not matter for someone who posts a few times a month, but it sure is annoying.