Hanging on
It was interesting to read the letter from William Allen (July 13) and the methods to "junk" your sensitive email.
If you send emails from work it is likely that copies will be retained on their mail or other server(s). If you email from home your email will be stored on your internet service provider's (ISP) server. Copies are also kept on the recipient's server(s)/computers (ISP, work, home).
ISPs also keep backup copies of servers. So even if the data is deleted from the server, there is no guarantee that it has been eradicated entirely.
For those wishing to retrieve information there are many copies out there. Just because you can't see it does not mean it is no longer there.
A sobering thought!
Philip Keogh
Mock Opera
John Purser (Online, July 6) writes about Opera's ability to pretend to web servers that it is Netscape or Internet Explorer. While this allows its users to get around poorly coded websites that deny them access, it is also incredibly annoying for web developers.
If a browser is pretending to be something which it is not, then it makes it impossible to deal with any differences between it and other browsers in an intelligent way. This type of hack does nothing positive to solve the problem.
Stephen Dunn
Threat to net
Richard Wild (Feedback, July 13) thinks some of the fears raised in Bill Thompson's article (July 6) "will not be realised" because the internet already exists, and "the standards cannot be changed".
The web was born in the early 1990s and to transport the data, a new protocol was invented called HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol). But TCP/IP and other protocols date back to the 1970s.
Microsoft and others have tried to gain a foothold with various new "standards" that layer themselves over existing protocols. One example is the failed "channels" scheme that was launched with Internet Explorer 4 and closely tied into the Windows 9x operating systems. "Channels" were an early attempt at an XML (rather than HTML) platform. XML standards are still to be finally and formally agreed, but all are open standards. Wap is not.
Yes, corporations could steal "the web" from us. They just have to invent something new on top (eg Flash from Macromedia). Case closed, job done. Luckily, it is the inertia of the existing data on the web that may just halt such attempts, and HTML may be a computer virus whose progress is unstoppable!
Gordon Joly
If, as Richard Wild says, it is impossible for a single corporation to "steal" the internet, then I might feel more relaxed about not being able to use First Direct's online banking service from Netscape, Opera or any browser other than IE running on Windows. To say nothing of the other "Internet Explorer Only" sites.
Microsoft is possibly the one corporation that could steal the web. The anti-trust case bought to light an internal email from Bill Gates on January 28, 1997, instructing staff that it would be the wrong strategy not to force Office users to use IE and to make unilateral extensions to HTML. He told them to patent elements of Microsoft's HTML rendering engine and make it extremely hard to clone. (See www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/10603.html.
I assume that Microsoft's tenacious efforts to ensure that Internet Explorer is the only browser shipped with new PCs are directed at a wider goal of controlling both the browser and the server software used on the web.
Jim Hague
