Those awfully clever Zero Knowledge folks have placed a cookie on the web here which it claims can read your Pentium III serial number even if it’s turned off. See The Sherriff's earlier story: PSN back from the dead We tried it on The Register’s P3 system (which had the serial number turned on). It was hardly, shall we say, sneaky and underhand. The system fell in a heap and had to be restarted from cold (which is what Chipzilla has always said you need to do in order to enable the serial number), so the chances of your number being read without your knowledge are rather slim unless you have brain cells numbering in single figures. Oh and by the way, the utility stripped a bunch of zeros out of the number, so it got it wrong anyway. Zero Knowledge says we’re number 0672226fa25d71bf The actual number is 00000672000226FA025D71BF Take The Register challenge: OK, my little Zeroes, if you’re so smart, you tell us the name of the individual who uses this system. If you can’t do this, the whole privacy issue surrounding serial numbers is a load of bullshit. You have 24 hours from the non-ISO date and time shown on this story... ®