Legal Commentary

There's a Fork in My TACO

By Professor University of Miami School of Law

I was a happy user of Firefox Privacy extension TACO ever since I met its author, Christopher Soghoian, at a privacy conference. It did one thing really well - block tracking cookies. Regular cookie managers do a bad job of this, because their approach is to delete cookies, when in fact often what one needs to do is locate (often not easy) and then preserve opt-out cookies.

The other day, however, TACO — which stands for Targeted Advertising Cookie Opt-Out — got 'upgraded' and now pops up and offers many optional and proprietary modules by a company I never heard of called Abine. The modules do…stuff…some of which may want to be paid for or might do stuff I didn't want or didn't understand. This all looked more complicated than I wanted. So I'm delighted to learn that someone has forked TACO, putting it back like it was only better. The retro-TACO is available for your enjoyment as Beef Taco.

Note that I'm not saying that the new improved TACO 3.0 is evil, or the proprietary stuff is bad, just that I can't be bothered right now. For more on all this see Forking TACO 2.0 by Beef TACO author John Hobbs, which pretty much captures my feelings and includes a very gracious response by one Rob Shavel from Abine. There's even more at Slashdot.

(Post date corrected)

Full post as published by Discourse.net on July 05, 2010 (boomark / email).