{"id":32238,"date":"2011-08-23T11:44:09","date_gmt":"2011-08-23T09:44:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/?p=32238"},"modified":"2011-08-23T12:34:32","modified_gmt":"2011-08-23T10:34:32","slug":"microsoft-removes-tracking-code-from-msn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/internet\/32238-microsoft-removes-tracking-code-from-msn.html","title":{"rendered":"Microsoft removes tracking code from MSN"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a title=\"Microsoft\" href=\"http:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/vb\/showthread.php\/211580-Microsoft\">Microsoft<\/a> announced the removal of the code in a blog post on 18 August 2011, the same day that researchers published information revealing that MSN and three other Microsoft websites host JavaScript code that was capable of identifying users even after they had deleted their cookie cache from their hard drive.<\/p>\n<p>The code, which was copyrighted in 2007, stored itself in a browser&#8217;s cache folder, and contained two separate methods of identifying users. The first method made use of a machine unique identifier (MUID) in addition to instructions on how to recreate the file in the event that the cookie cache has been cleared.<\/p>\n<p>The second method included the MUID in an ETag, which was also stored in the cache.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe don&#8217;t really know what they were doing with this information, but it&#8217;s not obvious what this explanation would be,\u201d said <a title=\"Jonathan Mayer\" href=\"http:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/vb\/showthread.php\/359840-Jonathan-Mayer\">Jonathan Mayer<\/a>, a graduate student in Stanford University&#8217;s computer science department. Jonathan\u2019s research brought the practice of these \u201cSuper Cookies\u201d to public attention.<\/p>\n<p>Read the full story over at: <a title=\"The Register news site\" href=\"http:\/\/www.theregister.co.uk\/2011\/08\/22\/microsoft_zombie_cookie_disclosure\/\">The Register<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Microsoft has removed code from its MSN website that logged visitors\u2019 browsing histories even after users deleted their cookies<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":56,"featured_media":24869,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[3998,4000,123,463],"class_list":["post-32238","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-internet","tag-cookies","tag-jonathan-mayer","tag-microsoft","tag-security-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32238"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/56"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32238"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32238\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32262,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32238\/revisions\/32262"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24869"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32238"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32238"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32238"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}