"dave weil" wrote in message

On Tue, 2 Dec 2003 11:59:04 -0500, "Arny Krueger"
wrote:

"dave weil" wrote in message

On Tue, 2 Dec 2003 07:31:53 -0500, "Arny Krueger"
wrote:

Yeah, about as much as I believe that people who use your web site
are protected by anonynimity.

Weil, this sentence shows how little you know about how web sites
work, not to mention being perfectly horrible English. They're not
protected by anonymity, their anonymity is protected by the
simplistic, HTML-only implementation of the web site.

Untrue.

True. AFAIK, it's not possible to gather personal information with a
HTML-only web site. At most, I might be able to figure out that *someone*
accessed my site from a certain university or a corporation's computer
system. I can generally figure out that so many people accessed my site from
a particular country, or perhaps from a particular city. I still don't know
their identity. I just know that *someone* *someplace* did something that is
perfectly legal and innocent. Big deal.

In another post today Weil you claimed that I didn't address this
post, but obviously I did, about 4 hours before you made your claim.
So are you being stupid, lying or what?

Actually, you didn't directly address my point. You simply tried to
obfuscate.

What point might that be? That you're saying essentially nothing again, and
again?

In any case Weil you're being vague, and I presume that's because
you know so little about how web sites work. Who is putting you up
to this weirdness, anyway?

Weil, why don't you expose your ignorance further by trying to
describe the means by which one of my web sites obtains personal
information about people who browse it or download files from it.

When you tell an open forum that someone from Sony Corporation has
apparently downloaded material from your site, you acknowledge that
you have obtained personal information about people who browse it or
download files from it.

Wrong, that's corporate information. Thanks Weil for showing that you can't
tell the difference between individuals and corporations.

Let's start with the basics - the standard monitor records from just
about any web server contain the IP address of users whose usage is
actually logged by the web server. This is generally just a subset
of total usage.

In addition, these IP addresses typically lead to a bank of
dynamically-assigned IP addresses that on a good day can be pinned
down to a city, and that's about that.

So, you were lying about Sony then?

Sony happens to act as their own ISP.

In the case of AOL and several other large ISPs
they are global to the entire ISP.

Sony happens to act as their own ISP.

AFAIK, it's hard for a web site owner to learn much else about the
web site's users within the context of a pure-HTML web site.

So what's the purported scheme that I've supposedly got going here?

Shall I say the magic word again?

Sony.

Sony happens to act as their own ISP in a sense that lets me know that
sometimes people access my web site from there. I don't know who these
people are, or even if they are Sony employees. If I knew they were a Sony
employee, that would cut things down from a few billion people to a few
100,000 people. Big deal.

Here are the facts.

Your web site has no privacy policy.

False claim:

http://www.pcavtech.com/privacy.htm

It's a web site of mine and it's long had a privacy policy.

Since you seem to want to make a big issue of this, I just added this:

http://www.pcabx.com/privacy.htm There's a link to it on the home page.

That covers both of my web sites. IOW for you Weil, that covers all of the
web sites that I personally control.

Therefore, you are free to use the information gleaned from the server
logs however you wish.

Like I said, that information isn't personal.

You used this information to "unmask" publicly one of the users of
your site.

Not really. I found out about a corporate use of my site.

Therefore, you cannot claim that people have anonymity because you
have already breached that so-called anonymity.

I have not unmasked any individuals nor have I released personal
information about them. I don't have personal information that I can
reasonably attribute to a particular individual. I do know that someone from
Sony, which has something like 100,000 or more employees accessed my web
site once upon a time. But, I don't know that the person was even a Sony
employee.

And since you are willing to do this, who knows *what* you're
privately using this information for? You might be selling it to
finance your operations, for all we know.

For all you know I might still be doing so, even though I've promised not
to. However Weil, what this comment really shows is how ignorant you are
about the practical commercial value of such information. There ain't any.