[WikiEN-l] [sonyalebrun at hotmail.com: Hacker attack at Wikipedia]

[Brion Vibber]

> ----- Forwarded message from Sonya Lebrun <sonyalebrun at hotmail.com> -----
> I am using a computer in two or three public places to access Wikipedia. You
> have a 35 year Cookie on users to your site so I don't need to give you my
> static IP address.

Wikipedia does *not* set 35-year cookies. Temporary per-session cookies
(which are not saved after your close your browser), may be set with a
negative expiration time. Due to bizarrities of how time and numbers are
dealt with by computers, it is possible for a buggy program to display
what should be a negative/deliberately invalid time as a date around
either December 31, 1969, or sometime in 2038.

Please report the bug to the manufacturer of your browser.

> When I accessed his page to politely ask he stop,
> he placed a photo of himself into this computer’s Windows Cookie folder.
> This is illegal conduct and a criminal offense.

That is a normal function of your web browser called "caching". It saves
files on your disk in a temporary folder in order to save the trouble of
downloading them again the next time you load the same page. Some web
browsers mix saved HTML and image files in with the cookies.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)