About Cookies

I learned about cookies in order to automate the recording of UserNames. Google found this site for me which offered enough info to make it work.

http://www.bewley.net/perl/cookie-test.html

Cookies have a bad reputation. I think that they can be used responsibly and have tried to do so. I would like them better if I got them only when I asked for them. -- WardCunningham

From the Internet JunkBuster site: http://junkbuster.com:

"The Internet Junkbuster Proxy (TM) blocks unwanted banner ads and protects your privacy from cookies and other threats. It's free under the GPL (no warranty), runs under Windows 95/98/NT and a variety of UNIX �-like systems."

I use Proxomitron as my personal proxy to get rid of annoying things like those Zoom popunder windows. I had to fiddle with it though to get UserName to work here. I'm not sure what the best change is to do, but using the default Bypass didn't work. When I added *.c2.com/* to the AllowCookies?.txt file, that didn't work either. When I additionally disabled the default setting of Disable JavaScript (and meta) cookies, then it did. I don't know enough about cookies to know what a meta cookie is vs a non-meta cookie, but at least this thing works now. -- JeffWinchell

There is nothing wrong with cookies by themselves. It's when marketing wants to use them to find out all about a person. The advertising links are the way that they get tied to one another across distinct sites. The cookie gets looked up in the logs of each site reference and eventually the identity of the person can be intuited. This is then passed back around the cooperating sites.

You can turn off cookies in your browser, or turn on an alert box that asks for confirmation before accepting a cookie. For some reason, no browser offers the 'hybrid' alternative, which would be to ask for confirmation before accepting cookies from a domain you don't know yet.

Actually, there is a browser that does this. It is KFM, the file manager / browser which is part of KDE 1.2. You can set the default cookie policy for all sites to "ask" (or "accept" or "reject"), and then for known sites, individually, you can set a different policy (accept, reject, or ask). I don't know if Konqueror (KDE 2.0) has the same feature. -- RandyKramer

And then there is always the OperaBrowser, where you can select to reject third-party cookies from spamvertisers.

How to delete cookies? Well, just deliver an empty cookie with the same name. That should (at least with Netscape, Lynx and MSIE) delete that cookie.

If you are not so deep into setting cookies yourselves, you can also just delete the file cookies.txt in your Netscape directory (or softlink it to /dev/null to be done with it; that is a good choice for NS4.x users, since cookies will be available during a single browser session, i.e. for remembering the password, but will definitely be gone after closing the browser). That is more difficult for IE, since the cookies are not stored in one single file.

BTW, the MozillaBrowser (and thus Netscape 6.x) manages a positive and negative site list for cookie permissions. Really handy, since there are only relatively few ad companies, and once you have disallowed them during normal browsing, you are safe. Only need to specify once and for all that you don't like that site placing cookies on your machine... -- ErichKutschinski

About Mozilla, the OpenVMS version (Build ID 2001063010) seems to create as many files as I start it, in SYS$COMMON:[SYSMGR._MOZILLA.DEFAULT.XIZOL2BC_SLT]. I'll post this in the BUGZILLA page * http://bugzilla.mozilla.org. -- DidierMorandi

I think people are suspicious of cookies because they have such a cute name. TOO cute. If we named them Fuzzy Bunnies with Top Hats and Bow Ties, no browser would dare to include them.

If you use cookies, you should read the admonitions given in RandalSchwartz's column at http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/WebTechniques/col61.html.

Also note that cookies are user-editable by a sufficiently sophisticated user. This editability and the simple politeness of not storing a pile of data on the user's drive are good reasons for only storing a user ID value in a cookie.

Please note that modern browsers (Netscape 7, InternetExplorer 6, Opera 7) have the selectable cookie facility as an option in the setup. One can choose to accept or reject cookies from all sources individually. One can also choose to allow the source of a cookie to modify that cookie at will. Once you have made these decisions you need not be bothered again. Very nice for repeat visits that require cookies and change them with every new session.

How does one set that *after* setup, I'm running MozillaFirefox and can't seem to set c2.com to allow cookie modification? I have to go to UserName each time I restart the browser.

See the UserName page for more info about cookies in MozillaFirefox.