Escalation in the Cookie Wars

UPDATE: This just in: Macromedia’s Kevin Lynch reports, in a comment below, that Macromedia has defeated PIE!

Speaking of San Francisco’s Marcomedia, it’s got its hands full with a new kind of cookie. We write about it in today’s Mercury News here (or here). There are a lot of people pissed off at United Virtualities, which is the source of this new tracking device, called PIE, that basically hides within your Macromedia Flash Player. From the feedback we’re getting, if these guys at United Virtualities were Silicon Valley-based, we’d have to wonder whether they’d be run out of town…

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Here’s more:

–Here’s a link that will help explain the latest on disabling local shared objects in Flash, including PIE
–When we asked UV’s Mookie Tenembaum a follow-up question about whether his PIE can override the Macromedia’s global storage settings to reject all local shared objects, he didn’t respond. UV Spokesperson George Simpson got back to us instead: “I am told that by answering this question it would compromise something proprietary to UV and they choose not to respond. I appreciate that is it entirely unsatisfactory for you, but I am just following orders.”
–Macromedia, for its part, couldn’t assure us that it could definitely shut down PIE, but suggested UV was trying to create confusion with its claims.
–Here’s Kevin Lee on this.
–Here’s a piece at ClickZ news
–Finally, here’s UV’s press release on Pie.
–One artist’s rendering of Pie, below: