Spotify, About.me, and over two dozen other websites got caught with their hands in KISSmetric’s cookie jar and will have to defend themselves against a class action lawsuit filed by parties in Northern California. The class action suit accuses KISSmetric of mischievous monkey business in the way it continues to track Internet users even after they’ve deleted cookies and cleared their browser’s cache, which you can read more about here.
Wired.com first reported on KISSmetric’s shenanigans and followed it up by bringing attention to this current lawsuit. According to Wired’s investigation, KISSmetric relies on Flash, HTML5, and other technologies to trail Internet users, making it possible to recreate deleted cookies. Hulu and Spotify were two of the bigger names among KISSmetric’s clients, both of with cut ties with the service when news of KISSmetric’s operations hit the Web.
The class action suit accuses KISSmetrics and its clients of using “rogue tracking exploits,” stating that “while it is generally reasonable to expect a website to use cookies for tracking, the Website Defendants and KISSmetrics created numerous, alternative, ’shadow’ mechanisms for tracking; Defendants engaged in tracking to exploiting Plaintiff and Class Members’ browsers and other software in ways that consumers did not reasonably expect.”
According to Wired, similar suits filed two years ago against Quantcast and Clearspring for so-called “zombie cookies” resulted in a $2.4 million settlement.
See the article here:
Spotify and Other High Profile Sites Face Class Action Lawsuit for "Rogue Tracking Exploits"
Back in early 2009, we ran a piece in the QuickStart section of Maximum PC magazine on what effect the recession was having on the tech sector and what it might mean for company roadmaps. For that piece, an Intel spokesperson told us during a phone interview the chip giant has been through tough economic times before and the company understands “you can’t save your way out of a recession; you spend your way out.” It’s over two years later now, times are still tough, and Intel is still spending money.
AMD still hasn’t said when exactly it plans to launch its highly anticipated FX-series Bulldozer processors, though a promotional cartoon advertising the company’s Scorpius platform and FX chips 
Barracuda Networks obviously wasn’t paying attention to the mobile phone industry when it announced the doubling of cloud storage space to its customers. You see, the wireless industry has trained us to expect when changes are made to service plans, it’s often because they’re taking something away, like unlimited data. Barracuda, however, just doubled up the amount of storage space its cloud customers have access to, and did so without raising prices.
Here’s a challenge if you’re looking to kill some time. Look up a topic on Google — any topic — and see if Wikipedia doesn’t make the front page. This isn’t exactly an impossible mission, but by and large, Wikipedia makes its presence known nearly every time we search for something, which is partially the result of an army of volunteers adding and editing content on everything under the sun. But what would happen to Wikipedia if it was suddenly starved for writers?
Sorry, optimists. If the net neutrality law working its way through Washington ends up getting approved, that doesn’t necessarily mean that ISPs will stop traffic-shaping on their networks. Even the government realizes that; the FCC chairman created the “Open Internet Challenge” earlier this year with the sole purpose of creating apps that detect naughty neutrality-hating ISPs red-handed. That competition’s been a bust, but researcher Dan Kaminsky’s announced a free new app at the Black Hat conference in Vegas that promises to dothe same thing. He calls it N00ter, and that makes us smile.
