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Now, I'm considered to be fairly knowledgeable about computers, software, and technological advances, and have some cutting-edge firewall protection around my home and office PC's. I try to stay somewhat up-to-date on software and software spying toys, too.

This morning, I visited my own site to check a link. Imagine my surprise when Firefox wanted to set a cookie, on my site, from Ron Paul's 2008 website. That would be fine, if I had linked to Ron Paul's Website anywhere on my site...I hadn't. Never have, either. I pulled up my page source, and the only reference to Ron Paul in my code was the post I made last week concerning the Ron Paul supporters on the walk bridge, greeting Titan's fans on their way to the game.

Now, this is strange stuff. To make sure I hadn't screwed up anything, I deleted the reference to the site from Firefox's Cookie Exceptions panel, and came back in...sure enough, the Ron Paulites wanted to set a cookie!

WTF?? Somehow, the Ron Paul peeps want to track visitors to my site, with a remote spy bot? How else can we explain the cookie?

Volunteer Voters, and Kleinheider (gotta get that name spelled right, Kleinheider, so your Google and Technorati self-searches will be more fulfilling) linked to that post last week. I pretty much ignore WKRN and VV, now, so I had to filter through a week's worth of VV posts to find the link (with Sean Braisted retired, Kleinheider seems so...morose...but he made sure that there was a Stem post in there...); maybe that's the source of the Paulite's interest. Or maybe they are as Google-happy as Kleinheider.

I'm certainly curious how and why a site wants to set a cookie when they aren't welcome or invited or linked.

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Update!
Ron Paul has never passed up a chocolate-chip cookie...

Sleuth: Well, I heard that one of your vices is chocolate chip cookies.

Paul: Oooh. I'll confess to that. And I watch my diet pretty well. Like today I had a very big salad and a chocolate chip cookie. But I'm able to handle that. I figure, 'Well, I'll just make sure I make my exercises tonight.' But chocolate chip cookies are good! Did you ever have a homemade chocolate chip cookie?

From this pic (from Outside the Beltway's Caption Contest) it seems Ron Paul like the specially baked cookies...

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UPDATE 11/19/2007
Ron Paul is IN BED with GOOGLE-BLOGGER (my EYES!)