Author: Angrim
Date: 04:21:42 03/24/00
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On March 24, 2000 at 06:15:29, Tina Long wrote: > >Today we got McAfee "guard dog", which among other things checks for computer >invaders (my word). > >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. naive ;) Just relax Tina, an internet cookie is not a listening device, not even a program. It is simply a short text string which the web site which placed it can retrieve the next time that you visit them. Most sites that place cookies on your computer do so because the web page designer thought it was a neat idea(my opinion) and they are simply a minor waste of space. Some sites actual have good uses for cookies, such as sending you a cookie which contains the date that you last visited their site. Then the next time you connect to the site they can read this cookie from your computer and give you a "whats new" list. Since a site can only read cookies that it sent you, and the contents of the cookie are only what it sent, it is hard for a site to do much harm with a cookie. One thing that may surprise you is getting a cookie from a site that you don't think you connected to. Usually these are from the banner adds which are stored on another site, but which your computer has to connect to to display the add. With most browsers it is fairly easy to view the cookies stored on your computer, and easy to remove them. With Netscape on linux look in the file ~/.netscape/cookies and each line that does not start with a # is a cookie, ie. .tripod.com TRUE / FALSE 980653868 CookieStatus COOKIE_OK which is a cookie retrievable by any site in the tripod.com domain named "CookieStatus" and with value "COOKIE_OK" This cookie is a classic case of the webmaster thinking that cookies are neato spiffy and sending them without any real purpose. This cookie can be deleted with a regular text editor by deleting the line. I expect that with Internet Explorer there is something similar. Hope that clears things up more than it confuses them, I sure got verbose. Angrim
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