cookies

Public interest groups, academics and members of the press have hammered Google for its lax privacy policies. The criticism has mostly focused on the log deletion practices and browser cookie policies at the search giant. Google claims that search quality and user privacy are a zero-sum game: deleting log data makes it more difficult to improve search results. Perhaps the company is right. However, there are several other pro-privacy steps that Google could take to significantly protect its customers--which it has not done, and continues to reject.

Over the last few months, a number of Google's engineers have issued … Read more

I was reading Cote's write-up on the Adobe Engage conference and I just can't get excited about Adobe. Maybe it's because for me, the company still equates to Photoshop?

All of this AIR stuff looks like things people were doing with Macromedia Director back in the late 90's. And while I completely understand that this is easier to use, blah, blah, blah, I just can't get excited.

Anyway, at least Adobe is moving toward open source.

On the other hand, a fantastic technological breakthrough is Specialtys' CookieAlert where you can login and see who has … Read more

WASHINGTON--Ever tried giving your mother a primer on cookies--the Web, not chocolate chip, variety, of course?

It's not easy, but a user-generated video contest chiefly bankrolled by Google wants to help.

The competition began accepting entries about a month ago from about two dozen filmmakers interested in helping to demystify the tiny, widely used text files for a general audience. It concluded here Friday, at the second day of a Federal Trade Commission workshop on behavioral advertising, with the announcement of the victor, who was set to receive a $5,000 grand prize. (Click here to view all the entries that made the final cut … Read more

Next to guitars--real, virtual or something in-between--the most popular musical instruments we've seen on Crave are drums. From fingertip pads to several types of rollaway versions, percussive gadgets appear to be everywhere. But they usually don't look like a cookie sheet.

That's what the "Ion Digital Drum Station" resembles, though ThinkGeek nevertheless claims that it has "eight natural feeling, velocity-sensitive drum pads." They also come with their own sticks, headphones and MP3 inputs to help create custom tunes, or you can just play along to programmed patterns with 233 sounds available … Read more

Sometimes less really is more, and software that does a single task well is better than a feature-rich app that bogs down performance, clogs system memory, or over-reaches its abilities. Here are seven programs that were built to do a specific job, and succeed. These downloads may not have all the fixin's, but they taste great all the same.

UPDATED: We asked for your favorite picks and you responded. Here are five fresh one-trick ponies of the software world that you just love to bits.

MediaCell Video Converter This multiformat video converter makes the list thanks to a three-part, one-pane interface from which you browse for the video file, select the mobile device you'll be watching it on, and click the large, bubbly "convert" button. No need to concern yourself with file formats, bit rates, and sound quality. While users certainly can tweak the volume and settings themselves in the app's "output" section, MediaCell Video Converter's preset optimizations per device make it unnecessary for most.… Read more

Happy Friday, yet again.

Nary a day goes by when I don't think about eating my computer, or at least biting it out of frustration. I hope I'm not alone.

This week's audio/video weekend starter is straight from the brains of Jim Henson and Frank Oz. Enjoy watching the Cookie Monster's green brother do what we all want to do from time to time: eat the hell out of a computer.

Google has changed its Web cookie privacy policy to address a common complaint by privacy advocates that information about Web surfers' activities is retained too long by the search giant.

Cookies are small files stored on a computer so that it can be recognized when it revisits Web sites, enabling the site to remember the user's preferences for things like e-commerce and sites that require log-in. Under the new policy, Google cookies will expire after two years instead of in 2038, according to the official Google Blog.

The thinking was that users could always delete the cookies if they … Read more

-- IE 7 reaches 100 million users. Even with all those users, it still comes in second to Internet Explorer 6, which makes sense considering IE6 is the default browser on nearly every single PC. (News.com)

-- Google plugs account hijack holes. The vulnerabilities in question affected both Google Documents and GMail, giving hackers full access to your e-mail and spreadsheets. (News.com)

-- Report: Apple to charge some Mac users for wireless technologies. 802.11n, the next-generation wireless protocol, has secretly been shipping in Apple's computers for the past several months, but that functionality hasn't been … Read more

Enough of those proprietary Nabisco confections! MAKE and CRAFT have posted a link to geek/chef Joseph Hall's recipe for Ubuntu sugar cookies.

A fellow Craver also tracked down Ubuntu cake and, uh, soup. M'm! M'm! Linux.

(Photo: Joseph Hall)