Cookies????? - What are these things? Should I have
some privacy concerns about them?
Where can I find out about cookies?
Take a look at: http://www.emf.net/~mal/cookiesinfo.html
try: http://www.illuminatus.com/cookie
Check on MS Online Support at http://207.68.137.36/IESupport/content/faq/ie30w95b.htm for cookie as well as zipped files info.
I'm using IE 3.0 for NT 4.0. Somewhere in an IE promo I saw the promise of ending the cookie problem forever. Instead all I can do is deny a cookie one by one as they come in. What a hassle. Some sites, such as ESPNet send cookie after cookie, and either you deny each and every one just to get to the page, or you finally give up and accept one (and all) to end the hassle. Is there a way to tell IE 3.0 not to accept any cookie, and not bother me about it? IE 3.0 Help doesn't even contain the work 'cookie', according to its index and word search.
Nope. No way to just say "No Cookies Allowed".
It's been a very frequently requested feature over in the MS newsgroups, though. And the response has been that they're looking in to it for the next release.
You Got Three choices.
There are no other options.
Wrong. there are "4" options. Number four as follows:
For amusement, put something like "Ah ah ah....fooled you" in your cookies.txt file. then go to a page you "know" has cookies. then close the browser and check the cookies txt file....Notice, there are no new cookies in that file.
That works for Netscape but won't work with IE3 since IE3 stores each cookie in a separate file. Can't make the whole directory read only either since it's the temp dir for IE3. <Bummer> Just one more reason NOT to use IE 3
Or you can use Netscape, TAKE the cookie and use NSClean to erase it once you're done
Does the server merely write cookies to a specific file, such as cookies.txt? Then do as I do, create a file called cookies.txt, of zero length (or one byte), save it, and make it read-only. Am I deceiving myself by believing that this is effective? Or is cookie-information being saved in other files I know not?
IE 3 keeps each cookie in a separate file in the <windir>\Cookies folder.
It's actually not bad. It allows me to keep the cookies I want (like auto logon to the New York Times), but clean out the droppings from the ad people fairly easily.
You can do the same thing with a cookies.txt file, of course on browsers that use that. But having an extra clue in the filenames helps.
Can someone give me an explaination of what s "Cookie" is? NO! not the eating kind, the kind that you are able to stop being stored on your 'puter but MSIE.
What they are is a way of web site's to keep track of where you've been, what you've already seen at their site (on earlier visits), what you're preferences or interests are and in theory at least tailor the content to suit.
Quoted from "Sites Dip Into Cookies to Track User Info, Web Week, 3 June 1996" by Whit Andrews
"Without cookies, a site can track users as they visit sites, but not on a visit-to-visit basis. That means that if a visitor plays a game during one visit and reads the company's IPO prospectus the next, the company has no way to identify the user's diverse interests as belonging to the same person. Some other browsers besides Netscape's Navigator, including Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Oracle's PowerBrowser, can now also be used to transfer cookie information.
"Cookies let sites tag their visitors with unique identifiers so they can be identified every time they visit in the future. One site cannot read another's cookies--unless there's an agreement between the two.
"It is this ability to point to users and identify how many times they visited a site before, or which specific documents were called up and what interests the users expressed, that produced an outcry from right-to-privacy advocates when cookies were introduced a year ago.
"But cookies are now being used not only as a marketing opportunity for site managers, but as a device that will deliver to users the benefit of a site's knowing who they are and what they like.
"And sites are seeking to insulate themselves from any bad press, hustling to say that what goes in the cookie jar--actually a single file contained in the user's browser preferences subdirectory or folder--stays there."
As you can see from the date above, this article was written a while ago, when people first started noticing them and writing about them. Since then there have been billions more bytes worth written.
If you go to any search engine and search for cookies and Netscape or cookies and MSIE, or cookies not monster (a little Sesame Street humour there) you'll find plenty of articles and and more recent articles about cookies and what to do with/about them.
One thing you can do is set your browser up to warn you if a site is trying to send you one, and prompt you to accept/reject it. That way you can make a site by site decision about cookies.
Like everything in this world, cookies can be used for good or ill (from what I've read most of the _evil_ applications only exist in the minds of conspiracy theorists...at least for now ;-0). There are, however, applications that are not _evil_ but that might not be acceptable to an individual.
Carol Daniels cad@melbpc.org.au
Editor PC Update
Member Melbourne PC User Group
Last updated 14 October 1996