stuff

Cutting to the Chase

My degree is in film making, so I certainly know how to cut to chases. The entire privacy policy of Hugh's Ominous Valve Works can be stated as follows:

We have no idea who you are.

We don't try to find out.

We wouldn't do anything with it anyway.

In other words, we're the net like it used to be, and here it still is.

Advertising

I don't do the volume to be taken seriously by advertisers, which is good because I don't take them seriously. There will never be a commercial ad on Hugh's Ominous Valve Works, ever, not no matter, not no how. I'll pay for this thing some other way.

A few buttons and links go to commercial sites, such as RealAudio. If you don't like 'em, don't click 'em. The larger banner ads are hacks, parodies, or just post-modern art. They are rotated by a simple script that does nothing else, and they have no cookies, no referrers, and no active content whatsoever. In what's becoming a common practice on anti-corporate sites, I do let my bogus ads click through to anti-advertising organizations or just general strangeness.

I try really hard to be responsible about links off this site, but of course I can't control everything other people do. If you want to be absolutely, positively, 100 per cent certain, I suggest you just stay here, where you're as anonymous as the wind.

Statistical Data

A few very large files serve from another machine, at AT&T. Except for the technical mumbo-jumbo used by software to work the protocol properly, AT&T gets only the referring URL (this domain name), and user agent (what type of browser you have). They probably do something with this, but only as the aggregate statistic, as mentioned in their own privacy statement. Note that AT&T's web servers would have no way of knowing who you are, since they don't even know who I am. It's not even my account there.

My fast and very capable host, Verio, also keeps the usual hit counts and all that. I didn't pay for anything detailed, so I get the absolute rock-bottom statistics. They count which files get transfered most. The vacuum tube content seems most popular, which is cool, because I like it a lot. There are also a few lists of referring URLs, which are so aggregated as to be useless for surveillance purposes except mostly to show who's linked my site, something the search engines could find anyway. In fact, I hadn't looked at these for about a year, until curiosity overcame me recently. I found out that my major referring URLs are other pages on this site. Whoopie.

Cookies

This site has exactly one cookie, and it's safe to say most users never get it. I won't give away the fun, except to say that unless you explicitly click the word COOKIE, you won't get it, and if you do all it will do is stick a weird little message on your computer, which is never, ever, EVER read again. In December of 2001 the Borealis Bookstore won the Cookie Contest, being the first to tell what it says. However, if you do it, I'll send you some weird pictures anyway.

Atavistic Anarchism