Novell chief's credit card stolen online

[mea culpa <jericho () DIMENSIONAL COM>]

[Moderator: People like this need to be knee-capped. He flat out admits
 that he doesn't know how it happened, yet blames cookies? For all we
 know, he could have had it swiped off a plaintext file on some
 porn server he had given it to. The mechanism for transmitting this
 information is far stronger than the practices of the people who
 store it aftewards.]


Forwarded From: "John Q. Public" <tpublic () dimensional com>

Eric Schmidt blames cookies for cyber theft -- calls cookies 'one of the
biggest disasters for computers.'

By Ben Elgin, Sm@rt Reseller -- UPDATED December 2, 1999 3:26 PM PT

Novell chief Eric Schmidt knows firsthand the problem of Internet fraud.

Speaking at San Francisco's Digital Economy conference Thursday, Schmidt
informed the crowd that his credit card number had been stolen over the
Internet in the past.

Although he isn't sure exactly how his card number was lifted, Schmidt
says he believes it was through a mechanism that reads the cookies-files
sitting on a user's desktop and storing personal information, such as
passwords and preferences.

"Cookies are one of the biggest disasters for computers in the past
[several] years," says Schmidt, citing the lack of security and the
blatant breach of consumer privacy.

As Novell's chairman and CEO, Schmidt is trying to oust cookies with his
company's new "digitalme" online identification-management service. Based
on Novell Directory Services technology, digitalme is aiming to store and
consolidate a user's multiple passwords, address books, favorites lists
and purchasing preferences.

"Cookies are a great idea, [but] they are just stored in the wrong place,"
says Schmidt.

Schmidt's brush with cyber thieves may have left him wary, but not a whole
lot poorer. "My liability was $50 ... [but] I'm not sure what the credit
card company's liability was," he says.

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