url.el cookie policy

url.el cookie policy

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen]

I just discovered that Gnus has been setting (and returning) cookies for
the images that it fetches via `url-retrieve' and friends.  While this
is no catastrophe, it's probably not an information/tracking thing that
people would expect to happen when reading stuff via Gnus, I think.

However, switching this behaviour off in Gnus appears to be kinda
tricky.  Since `url-retrieve' (and friends) are asynchronous, and they
create new buffers, neither binding `url-cookie-untrusted-urls' to
`(".*")', nor setting it buffer-locally does the trick.

So I would suggest changing the default for `url-cookie-untrusted-urls'
to `(".*")' for Emacs 24.1, and then reworking the `url-retrieve'
interface (as previously discussed), and then let it take the cookie
setting thing as a parameter.

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
  bloggy blog http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/

Re: url.el cookie policy

[Antoine Levitt]

03/11/11 23:06, Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen
> I just discovered that Gnus has been setting (and returning) cookies for
> the images that it fetches via `url-retrieve' and friends.  While this
> is no catastrophe, it's probably not an information/tracking thing that
> people would expect to happen when reading stuff via Gnus, I think.
>
> However, switching this behaviour off in Gnus appears to be kinda
> tricky.  Since `url-retrieve' (and friends) are asynchronous, and they
> create new buffers, neither binding `url-cookie-untrusted-urls' to
> `(".*")', nor setting it buffer-locally does the trick.
>
> So I would suggest changing the default for `url-cookie-untrusted-urls'
> to `(".*")' for Emacs 24.1, and then reworking the `url-retrieve'
> interface (as previously discussed), and then let it take the cookie
> setting thing as a parameter.

I've been annoyed from time to time by "saving cookies to
~/.emacs.d/url/cookies..." messages. I set url-cookie-file to nil, but
that didn't seem to change anything.

I agree that url should ignore cookies by default. I'd be amazed if
anyone had any use for them in gnus.