Author: Shep
Date: 04:09:34 03/24/00
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On March 24, 2000 at 06:15:29, Tina Long wrote: > >I have been on the net for 15 minutes and 11 (eleven!!) places I have never been >have tried to place Cookies in my computer. Club Kasparov also tried to place a >cookie. > >Call me naive, I'd never heard of cookies until today, and I'm amazed & >disgusted. I've never heard of these companies or websites & they're planting >"listening devices" in my computer. Don't be too paranoid. Cookies are no "listening devices" of any kind (i.e. you cannot compare them to installed software which makes connections to other websites on its own). Typically they are used to identify a client during a session on a website or to re-identify a recurrent visitor of a site. Except for occasional browser bugs, it is not possible for a site to read cookies set by another site (even if the other site resides on the same machine, as long as the domain name is different). Sometimes an incorrectly configured webserver sets cookies as well, e.g. a cookie named EGSOFT_ID typically comes from Microsoft's IIS, or WEBTRENDS_ID (as set by clubkasparov.com) is set to allow WebTrends (a tool producing statistics on hits on a website) to produce a more detailed report, e.g. to distinguish a session (one user visiting the site and viewing 20 pages) from 20 page hits by 20 individual users etc. There's just as many "myths" about cookies as there are about Javascript. Most of them are pure exaggeration. Being an online developer, I may be biased in favour of cookies, though. :) --- Shep
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