Privacy and warranty statement.

    Since I started using the net before the first widely-known CERN browser was available, it's evident that the net has changed from file (FTP), email and news transfer mostly using ASCII characters to an international, global effort where some services like Gopher died and HTML emerged as the preferred way to deliver content. But later, graphics and movies have been added, among proprietary plug-ins like Macromedia's Flash.

Unfortunately, as the net grew in complexity and it was no more the exclusive domain of universities, scientists and geeks, marketers saw new and not always evident or ethical ways to attract people, make forced customers (or at least possible readers) and learn about visitors more than those visitors would want to disclose, if given the option. Around year 2000, I became increasingly concerned about the lack of privacy in the net and the waste of time and resources employed in spamming and at the same time, in fighting SPAM. Therefore, I decided finally in year 2002 to write this small statement to keep the peace of mind that visitors deserve.

Privacy. This site doesn't need cookies. It's all about static HTML and one minor JavaScript code to conceal the contact email address from automated email harvesters. Should this side try to set a cookie, it might be a temporary session cookie and it's a result of the whole server's settings, not my pages. This site is hosted privately for free, so I don't need ads and banners to support it. I only need to be able to pay yearly for the domain's name. The host's owner doesn't make a living from web hosting either, so there's no point in trying to track anyone. There are no web bugs, JavaScript traps (other than the aforementioned email protection code), ActiveX, Java applets, the so-called free counters and so on (sometimes, free counters try to get more than a hit count and/or are activated by web bugs). If you find something "dynamic" here please email me, I want to be notified. The site might have been hacked. In the past I had my own web counter, but I removed it due to the security problems of using MS FrontPage Extensions. If you contact me for including your utility ("packages and utilities" section), your company ("Interbase support list" section) or your case of use ("who uses Interbase" section) in my site and you didn't ask me explicitly to publish your email, I won't publish it (unless you included it as part of your case of use or it's the contact address for your company offering services, of course). One feature I hate in Outlook Express is that by default, every person that emails you gets added to your contacts list (and worse, extra accounts in the TO field and any accounts in the CC field get processed, too). It can be disabled, but most people do not realize this fact and their address book keeps growing to gruesome dimensions with emails of people they don't know, they never dealt with directly and that they aren't interested in knowing about, either. I've experienced this unwanted flow when anyone that didn't know me and I didn't know him/her sent an email to anyone in his/her contacts list and I was addressed, too. How did that happen? Simple: some friend mine sent previously an email to me and to that person among others and most of those people that aren't my friends collected automagically my email address thanks to Outlook Express. As a sad result of this, when they are hit by an emailing virus/worm, they annoy or infect not only their friends, but tens or hundreds of unrelated people. I don't use Outlook Express for email and besides, I do nothing to keep email addresses of the people that contact me. My address book has been almost frozen for four years (from 1998) and I seldom add manually some personal contacts, nothing more. Conversely, if you posted your case of use to my site and didn't ask for your email to be preserved in the text, I may be unable to contact you to request a future revision of your document, unless I pick you again from some of the tech forums where I participate. I don't disclose, share, exchange or sell email addresses. I don't have an "associated site" that may start sending you UCE (unsolicited commercial email, aka SPAM) after you contact me. It has become increasingly popular the abominable practice of sharing emails with "associated companies" so when they target you, you only know someone is the associate that disclosed your email, but they don't tell you who is that partner, so you may well decide that's a simple lie; otherwise you don't know which of the companies you relied in was the one that betrayed you. Even supposedly serious companies that resort to this policy doesn't list the other companies that may get your email from them. I hate this practice.

No warranties. Sorry, but I cannot make warranties, either implied or explicit, about the information contained in this site. I've tried to keep the information accurate without being excessively focused on details. Some information may be outdated. I've gathered knowledge from public documents, directly from some friends that I considered good sources and also used my own knowledge and experience. I reserve the right to expose my own opinions on some subjects, of course. Whether you like my comments or not is your decision. I don't claim to be correct always but I don't have time to engage in rhetorical discussions. Most of the links in the "packages and utilities" page point to third party sites. Some of the utilities' names I highlighted (because they were free at the time I knew about them) may have turned commercial after I checked them. If you find one of them, please let me know. Some URLs may be obsolete. The whole problem of the web is millions of broken links, just try a search engine that's supposed to be refreshed after a few weeks. I've found several broken links in static sites with paid personnel to maintain them, so please don't ask for miracles here. I make no warranty about the usefulness, correctness or effectiveness of the SW that I linked from that "packages and utilities" page. I cannot research all those SW companies to learn about their privacy policy and commercial warranty. There are a few utilities hosted here in my own site, linked from that page, too. They are currently all free, with or without source code included. I cannot overstate that I don't and cannot make warranties about links provided in other pages, neither about the companies I list under the "Interbase support list" page. Consult their policies, try to get facts from other users and take your decision. I have my preferences and may give recommendations, but this doesn't mean I can make an official endorsement. I don't have any formal association with any of the companies I list. If I'm having a deal with one of them at the time you surf my site, it's because I'm a freelance consultant and developer and, unlike birds, I cannot go to the place to eat the breadcrumbs, so I have to work; otherwise I would be updating this site from a portable computer, under a bridge.

Donations, tip jars and other scams. I never have asked people for money to keep this site running. I never have asked companies or individuals to give me money for listing their utilities, whether commercial or free. I never have asked companies for some shared profit or pay-per-click when listing them at the support page. (See, none of those links contains the typical parameters carrying my account name that's typical of sites that make a living from piggybacking users to commercial sites. There's only one parameterized query in a URL that's for extracting info from a Borland's search engine that queries that's company's own documents about the product this site is dedicated to.) The reason is that the fellow that provides the hosting uses his own resources and charges me nothing neither he asks me to link to his company nor to provide any banner. Even though I live in an underdeveloped country, paying for my domain, considering that the payment lasts a full year, it's affordable. In the unlikely event that you receive a letter supposedly from my account, asking for money with this site's maintenance as a scapegoat, treat it very carefully. Should I need (for whatever unfortunate reason) to find another web host and pay for it, I will probably send a plea to the very specific forums that are related to this site's main contents and direct interested chaps to a URL here explaining the problem, instead of spamming people. (Anyway, it would be more transparent to ask that the donor goes to my registrar and pays for the renewal of my domain instead of giving me money.) I don't have a PayPal account or another service like that, so don't be fooled by someone trying to impersonate me. This site is free. No strings attached. No fine print. No VIP lounge, no special section for registered users. There are no registered users here. I only keep a private page for my former classmates.

Claudio Valderrama C., circa May 2002.

This page was last updated on 2002-05-10 02:01:30