Henry is right in raising the issue of privacy. It's a common topic which attracts great interest on the Net generally. There is one perspective which regards privacy as the other side of security (think of Zimmerman and PGP). Watch out for governments! ;) And of course security of transactions is of great concern to pharmaceutical companies (ie commercial privacy). I forward below *one* development "out there" that responds to the myriad concerns about privacy, that came to me via the HTML Writers Guild Business list to which I am subscribed. Some chemweb members may be interested. That list also discussed cookies, and their pros & cons quite extensively in recent months. The archives can be searched (eg for "cookies") from the page at http://sunsite.unc.edu/hwg-bin/query Views vary widely, sometimes with extreme positions being taken, regarding this little bit of technology. Rgds., Alan Mills at Venus Internet Ltd, 24 Denmark Street, London WC2H 8NJ, UK email:alan@venus.co.uk web:http://www.venus.co.uk Tel: +44 (0)171 240 5858 Fax: +44 (0)171 240 5859 Providing Web and Internet services and solutions ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Sun, 26 May 1996 16:26:52 -0400 (EDT) From: Seth I. Rich <seth@hygnet.com> To: hwg-business@daft.com Subject: COMMUNITY CONNEXION ANNOUNCES WORLDWIDE BETA-TEST OF THE ANONYMIZER (fwd) I'm forwarding this message (from which I've snipped a bit out of the middle) because I strongly support privacy on the Internet. We need more anonymous tools, IMO. Anyway:

For Immediate Release - May 24, 1996 Contact: Sameer Parekh 510-601-9777x3

COMMUNITY CONNEXION ANNOUNCES WORLDWIDE BETA-TEST OF THE ANONYMIZER

BERKELEY, CA - Community ConneXion, Inc., The Internet Privacy Provider, announced today the worldwide Beta release of the "Anonymizer" service for the World-Wide-Web.

The Anonymizer allows people browsing the web to be completely anonymous when making web transactions. It protects people from having the sites they visit discover their email address, hostname, type of computer, and other potentially sensitive information.

[...]

The Anonymizer can be accessed at http://www.anonymizer.com/. Users need only click on "BEGIN SURFING ANONYMOUSLY" and then choose a site to visit anonymously. All their web transactions from that point on are anonymized. As the service is only in Beta phase at this point, users may experience slow connections or downtime. As the service moves to Production release, these problems will be eliminated.

Community ConneXion is the leading provider of privacy on the Internet. They provide anonymous and pseudonymous internet access and web pages in addition to powerful web service, virtual hosts, and web design consultation. Information is available from their web pages at http://www.c2.net/. --

Seth I. Rich - seth@hygnet.com "Info-Puritan elitist crapola!!" Systems Administrator / Webmaster, HYGNet (pbeilard@direct.ca) Rabbits on walls, no problem. ----- chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. Archived as: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To unsubscribe, send to listserver@ic.ac.uk the following message; unsubscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (rzepa@ic.ac.uk)