Cross-Asset Desk
What this desk keeps about a reader
Cross-Asset Desk ResearchUpdated:
Reading a page here leaves a single line in a web server's log, and this desk keeps nothing else about the reader. What that line holds, the fourteen days it lasts, the two questions it is opened to answer, and the ways of watching a reader that this domain does not use, are set out below.
The line a request leaves behind
A request for a page on this domain is answered by a web server, and the server notes the transaction down in the ordinary way. Seven things go into that note: the network address a request came from, the date and the time of it, the method used and the address asked for, the code the answer carried, how many bytes went back with that answer, the identifying string the browser or the crawler announced itself with, and the page a link was followed from where a browser passes that along. A crawler is written down in the same seven fields as a person, and nothing of this desk's own goes into either: no reader is handed a number on a first visit, so there is no number to look for on a second.
A request that fails is noted once more, in the separate file the server keeps for failures. That note carries the network address, the page asked for and the reason the request could not be answered, and it is held and disposed of on the same terms as the first.
Fourteen days, and the two questions
The file those lines go into is rotated by the server each night, and a file older than fourteen days is deleted rather than archived. Nothing is carried out of one before it goes — no counter, no running total, no summary that would outlive the lines it was drawn from — so a visit made a fortnight ago has left nothing on the machine at all.
While a line is there it is opened for two questions. Are the pages reaching the readers and the crawlers asking for them, and is a run of requests a person reading or a script going through the site at speed. The people who keep this site standing are the ones who look. The file is not sold, not rented, not passed to an advertising network or a data broker, and never set beside a list from somewhere else to work out whose address stands in it. The machine is rented, which makes the company renting it out the one other party able to reach the disk the file sits on.
What this domain was never fitted with
Most of what a page like this usually has to account for is absent here because it was never built in. No cookie is set and none is read. There is no analytics property, no tag container and no visitor counter. There is no advertising pixel, no remarketing tag and no identifier hung on an address to record which link brought a reader in.
Every page is a finished file, written when the site is built and sent as it stands, so nothing is assembled while a reader waits, no script runs in the browser and nothing calls home afterwards. The stylesheet, both typefaces and every rule and figure on these pages are served from this domain, which means opening a page tells no other company that it was opened. There is no account to open, no sign-in, no comment field, no newsletter box and no search box: nowhere to type, and so nothing typed for the desk to hold.
The moment a link hands a reader on
The addresses that leave this site point at the documents the figures came from — a venue's fee schedule, its trading terms, an audit record. Each is printed as the plain address, with no tracking parameter added and nothing of this desk's standing in the middle of the click. Which of them a reader takes is therefore something this site never learns.
What happens after the click belongs to the operator on the other end and is covered by whatever that operator publishes, not by this page. The legal notice carries the rest of the terms these pages are read under.
The mailbox, and having something taken out
Correspondence reaches this desk at desk@gerhardandlinger.net, and there is no second address and no second box. A message sits in that box, with the address it was sent from, while the question it raises is open, and where it corrected a figure it sits beside the note of that correction. It joins no mailing list, this desk keeping none.
Say so at that address to learn what survives from an earlier exchange, to have the exchange wiped, or to have a line lifted out of the log; name the day and the page you mean. The answer comes back from the desk rather than from a system, and a log line can be taken out for as long as the file holding it is still on the machine — after fourteen days there is nothing left to take out.