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Talking about the rule of silence in GUIs, I wish I could slap the eurocrats who decided to force websites to show the cookie warning on a first visit of all websites. Did they even understand the consequence and wasted time of what they were doing? Having to click all the time to get this dumb warning off?

Of course some websites had to do it in an even dumber way than the law asks for. Like slashdot: http://i.imgur.com/5Fp0nmo.png

This is what greets the French every time slashdot decides to forget you agreed to let them put cookies on your computer and you need to click continue before you can get to the actual website.

The law actually made it worse for the people it's supposed to protect (those who might refuse cookies for privacy?) because those warning then will stick around like glue if they can't give you a cookie to remember you accepted their existence.




The 'best' part is that the only way to remember the fact that the warning was shown (and not display it any more) is to use a cookie or something functionally equivalent to one.[0] So instead of empowering people who wish to protect their privacy, these warnings push people even further to keep cookies enabled.

[0] Storing it server-side, per IP address, is obviously impractical.




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