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 Administrative / General / 2799
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Subject: 
Re: Suggestion for improvement
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.admin.general
Date: 
Fri, 3 Sep 1999 17:12:54 GMT
Viewed: 
151 times
  
In lugnet.admin.general, Larry Pieniazek <lar@voyager.net> writes:

What I would like is to distinguish the notion of machine and person...

I have multiple machines and may be at any of them. Other people in my
family also use any or all of them. This is where cookies don't do the
whole thing, inasmuch as they are machine specific.

Consider myYahoo. If you log in explicitly, you can be any one of
several people who will see different things, even from the same
machine. As soon as you take the convenience of cookies you're always
the same person.

Hmm, I must be misunderstanding your meaning -- that sounds contradictory.
If person A in your family logs in and does stuff, then person B logs in
instead and does stuff, then that's two different people using the same
machine (two different valid identities for one machine), but you do get the
full convenience of cookies and you're not always the same person.

When you log in to My Yahoo!, you're not logging your _machine_ in, you're
logging _yourself_ in from some particular browser session on some
particular machine.  Sure, anyone can walk up to your machine and pretend to
be you while you're logged in as you, but that's different from logging the
machine in.  You can run simultaneous multiple browsers, each logged in as a
different family member, all on the same machine.

A cool feature (that I think I've seen at least one place) is auto-logout --
where if you're at the library or someplace, the server gives you a
temporary cookie instead of a permanent one when you log in.  That way, it
disappears when you end the browser session, even if you don't explicitly
log out.  You could also protect yourself by asking the server to require
you to re-log in if you hadn't accessed any pages for some time period that
you had specified at login time.  Or you could also protect yourself by
asking the server not to honor logins from other machines in case you'd left
yourself logged in somewhere (I guess that's actually just a special case of
changing your password).


Now, multiple browser profiles do help that some, you
can have different sets of cookies by profile and Taya uses a different
profile than I do.

That's even better yet -- cookies plus separate (possibly roving) profiles.

--Todd



Message has 2 Replies:
  Re: Suggestion for improvement
 
(...) [Some snippage] (...) [More snippage] Didn't you two just say the same thing? It's better for people if their usage history isn't tied to a specific machine. (...) Another cool feature: explicit logout. Click the "logout" button on the (...) (25 years ago, 3-Sep-99, to lugnet.admin.general)
  Re: Suggestion for improvement
 
Didn't explain myself well. Comes from talking too fast. I use myYahoo for this but it works this way for many many ecommerce sites (Amazon, for example) If you explicitly log in to yahoo, you're indeed logging in as a person. And anyone who wants (...) (25 years ago, 3-Sep-99, to lugnet.admin.general)

Message is in Reply To:
  Re: Suggestion for improvement
 
What I would like is to distinguish the notion of machine and person... I have multiple machines and may be at any of them. Other people in my family also use any or all of them. This is where cookies don't do the whole thing, inasmuch as they are (...) (25 years ago, 3-Sep-99, to lugnet.admin.general)

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