Please, please, please don't suggest people use the k&r book to learn C. It is one bad practice after another and many of the suggestions in that book have given C much of its reputation for buffer overflows, stack smashing, etc.
If I build a service that needs a cookie to persist in the event of a user purging their cookies I don't think Google would accept that and just not delete it. The same is true for Google. If a user purges their cookies there shouldn't be any set afterwards.
However... what's probably happening here is that the cookie is being deleted but then created again immediately afterwards because something in the user's browser is connected to a Google server and that makes a new cookie if it detects the old one has gone away. The message in the tweet is informing the user that will happen. Arguably that's a reasonably useful notification - it stops the user mistakenly believing purging their cookies will log them out.
EDIT: Or, more likely, Google are actually storing the user's logged in state in localstorage or something, so clearing cookies won't log you out because there isn't a cookie.
Forget about the ‘remove all’ button. Clicking the huge delete button with ‘trash’ icon that is supposed to delete the cookie one by one just hides the entry and then every Google Cookie is back when you refresh the page.
Just to play devils advocate. There could be some security advantage in using cookies rather than some other mechanism for storing user state information. It could reduce the attack surface.
What's there to investigate? What's more likely, that people obsessed with social justice latched onto a story about a guy who gave a clinical discussion about rape statistics [1], alleging him to be a rape apologist, or that there's a conspiracy by the US government to smear Linux contributors who don't like backdoors?
They're not mutually exclusive, but someone attempting to connect the two will have to provide some evidence. So far, I've not seen any from anyone.
I mean, how exactly would this theory work? Intel/Microsoft/FBI/NSA is paying or fomenting "SJW trolls" to cause havoc and slander anyone who gets in their way of implementing a potential backdoor? What'll happen when they're up against cryptography contributors who are super progressive or have a "clean record"?
To me this seems way more likely to be just typical social media outcry and hyperbole with nothing nefarious underneath it. And in this instance, it just happens to have affected someone involved with Linux cryptography.
