Het Bijstere Spoor

Samy, famous for his worm, released evercookie this week. Evercookie stores cookies is various storage mechanisms such as Flash Local Shared Objects (also known as flookies), HTML5 storage mechanisms and even in the history and cache. When any of these are wiped by the user the script will repopulate it, making it very hard to get rid of your cookies.

This is technique is common to circumvent a users' privacy wishes, which Clearspring recently got sued for, but it's put in overdrive.

One good use for it is banning users. In the past I've used ips + cookies to ensure a user stays banned, but it doesn't take much to change your ip address and clear your cookies. All these techniques together make it a lot harder to get through. Because Flash stores it's flookies in a central place in the operating system, the cookies often even live in multiple browsers and private browsing sessions.

Most of all, I think the tool is made to make a point. It's very hard for the average user to clear all the tracking information. It should be doable with a press of a button, without losing all your settings and history for every other site.

Like half of the web development community, I recently became really interested in location-enabled stuff ;)

I really want to get a GPS tracker (for christmas!, hint hint!), there seem to be a couple out there, so I'm wondering if there's any people who have such a device and what their experiences are. Ideal features:

• Small! I don't need to display, I just want to drop it in my backpack and forget about it.
• Has USB, all I need is something that spits out cvs data (or similar format) on the drive which I can extract.
• Somewhat good battery life (>24h).
• Most importantly, charges through USB. Batteries is a no-go (for any device for that matter, I'm looking at you wii controller.)

So we have some options:

Professional mini tracker key

Pro:

• Title of the product is completely written in uppercase, has to mean something right?
• Logs data every second.

Con:

• Uses AA batteries.
• No specs on battery life.
• No specs on how to extract the data, but has USB.
• On the expensive side ($278.99).

TRACKING KEY LAS-1505

Pro:

• "Ideal For Parents Who Want To See If Their Teenagers Are Speeding", seriously.. the page says that literally.

Con:

• Runs on AA batteries.
• Price ($206).

Amod AGL3080

Pro:

• Looks like a more decent product.
• Price: $69
• Uses standard format for data (works as csv on usb drive), accessible with my scripting powers.
• Works on a set interval or 'Push to log'.
• Works for 15 hours (good enough).

Con:

• AA batteries.

Zoombak ZMBK200

Pro:

• Totally rad name!
• A/C wall charger! (the only one so far).

Con:

• Battery life for 150 location requests.
• Subscription fee! (this is where I'm not even going to look for more cons).

Trackstick 2

Pro:

• Reasonable price: $114.
• Exports to CSV.

Con:

• 1MB flash drive.
• AA batteries.

Conclusion so far:

The Amod AGL3080 seems by a stretch the most impressive device, not only does it seem to have a good battery life, and plenty of storage. Just judging from the page on amazon, it quite frankly seems the most professional, despite it having the lowest price on the list.

Dear lazyweb, am I making a mistake? Are there better devices out there?