FEB 14did anything change today?
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Susan Ettenheim
Member
February 14, 2011
Today was day 12 in our Scratch work and today was the day to visit each other's projects and leave comments. When everyone logged in, they were logged in as other students in the room. We cleared the history, cache, everything we could find. We quit the browsers (Safari and Firefox). We restarted the computers and 28 people all had the same problem!! As I said, this was day 12 and we've never had this problem before! What could it be?
They put the comments in a Google Doc for today and will copy and paste them in the right user when we get this problem fixed. The fact that everyone was signed in just fine in our Google Apps domain makes me think this is something with Scratch.
Thanks!
Sorry you are having trouble! We have heard of this happening a few times in the past. It appears to be caused by network security measures that manage cookies independently of the individual computers themselves. If you can pass the information onto the people in charge of your network, we'd be happy to discuss this with them to try to help sort this out. Here's a synopsis of our understanding of the issue:
The Scratch website, like many others, uses "cookies" to keep track of the user account that is logged in. A cookie is a small file placed on the user's computer. All that ours does is identify the account that has logged in. Sometimes problems arise when networks try to manage the cookies on their own, instead of allowing the site to place the cookie on the user's machine. If the network gets mixed up or isn't configured properly, it can start to assign the wrong cookie to the machine(s) on the network. As a result, the people using that network will start to get logged in as the wrong user. The solution is to fix the configuration of the network, or allow sites like Scratch to write the cookie directly onto the user's machine (which is the way it works with most network configurations - still very secure, and an industry standard).
Not sure why you had no trouble logging into google docs, but they may use a different system.
Hi Susan,
I've forwarded this to Amos and Andres. I hope that they'll have some ideas!
Thanks,
K