What tracking tool beside IP checking & cookie reading are there?

Hello,

I thought that IP checking and cookie writing and then reading were the only 2 ways
for a server to keep track of a user, but apparently there is another way.
What is that?

For example, this site is able to know who I am, even though I have cleared my
Cookies and use a different IP than the original IP I used to visit it 1st.
How is that possible?
How can a site keep track of you beside IP tracking and Cookie writhing / reading?

This issue/question has really been baffling me.

Regards,

There are also the loosely termed ‘supercookies’ which is a technique based on multiple local data storage e.g html5 dom storage, flash local shared object, java and silverlight data caches, and also browser/OS/IP metric fingerprinting, which they use to store, retrieve and regenerate data associated with a user.

ThanX.

WOW! What are these?
What is the best read on these other browser identification methods?

Regards,

The original ‘Evercookie’ demo script can be found at http://samy.pl/evercookie/ (Supercookie is what the media called it)

The CSS browser history hack* portion no longer works with latest versions of Firefox & IE, visitors with older browsers are of course still vulnerable.
*Identified by MIT students over a decade ago and re-worked by Jerimiah Grossman as a means of reading a browsers entire surfing history and his blog entry is a fascinating read all by itself:)

Getting a bit more advanced is the newer concept of visitor PC profiling. Not as specific as an individual cookie but rather more a way of identify which ‘herd’ of visitors/consumers a particular PC belongs to, though it can sometimes be very accurate! See https://panopticlick.eff.org/ Most of the script used is Javascript with help from a small amount of Flash that can be replicated with a little digging into the source code.