Cookies on Remko's Blog

On forbes.com, Cookies and Ads

Tue, 14 Mar 2017 16:34:52 +0000

Even though I try not to visit the forbes.com site anymore due to their heavy usages of ads, anti adblocker and overwhelming number of cookies they’re trying to push, sometimes however I accidentally follow a tweet that leads to forbes.com and just notice it to late.

Besides wasting your bandwidth, mobile data and especially time there have been a few occasions were the forbes.com page was actually serving malware from their adfeeds.

It annoys me bigtime so let’s “fix” this:

First thing that happens upon visiting the forbes site is that you get a blurred background with a random ad or quote of the day and you need to press Continue to article:

If you open the Developer console in Chrome (Application tab) you can see that Forbes uses a cookie that expires in 24 hours. This cookie make sure that you don’t see the “welcome” ad for 24 hours:

Wordpress and the Cookie Monster

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 15:19:19 +0000

As you are probably aware the EU has made legislation regarding the use of cookies on websites. This new legislation is active since May 2012.

The Dutch government has also issued legislation in the Telecommunications LAW which states that you must ask the user for permissions before server out cooking. Unless these cookies are necessary for the correct technical working of the website or service. This leaves some grey areas but for instance using Google Analytics is a clear case of a situation where opt-in is required.

Although I am not using Google Analytics I wanted to check what cookies my own blog was serving out and if it was necessary to ask for an opt-in.

Cookie Error on Citrix XenApp

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 10:02:10 +0000

A user reported that the following error while visiting a website on a Citrix XenApp server:

I tried adding the site to the Trusted Sites List and adding the url to the Per Site Privacy list:

But this didn't work, but I noticed that the site was "flickering" a lot so I suspected that HDX Flash Acceleration was the problem.