Re: The Way the Cookies Crumble.

[Cloudmaster <sauer@cloudmaster.ml.org>]

On Tue, 25 Aug 1998, mike packard wrote:
> > to any significant disk space.  But that isn't the issue.  I'd prefer
> > not to have marketroids sticking suction-dart tracking transmitters
> > onto my car every time I leave the house, and very rarely do cookies
> > have a different function.
> 
> I disagree with the concept of cookies as well, though my overactive
> imaginiation is giving me a pretty funny picture of a little flying robot
> attempting to fasten some Borg-esque device to the back of my Nissan.  :) 

Why does anyone have a problem with cookies?  There's an "expire"
attribute for them which isn't any real long length of time (often it's
set to expire ina minute or so), and they're not compromising anyone's
security.  Their whole point is to store a little bit fo information on
the user's computer so teh content provcider doesn't have to provide
enough space to store seperate files for each user.  Everybody wins,
because the user is able to view content that can remember more than the
address of the previous page(s) visited (which is acesible from
javascript, among other things) - nad the content provider wins because
they dont have to invest in large amounts of disk space to keep track of
user's activities.

Disabling cookies doesn't prevent web page maintainers from knowing wher
you've gone, because there's this neat file that's known as an "access
log" that can be used for that.

Cookies can only be read by the site that created them, so only the
creator knows what you've selected/done on his pages - which I don't
really see as a problem.  Of course, I don't do anything on the web that I
really have a problem with other people knowiing about.  If I were a
regular visiter to www.nakedpeople.com or teh like, I might worry about
it...

In short, I've yet to see a compelling reason to get rid of cookies, other
than "there's benn a bunch of media hype about internet security and
cookies must be bad since I don't know what they are - just that they
come from the internet."

This is just my humble opinion though...

> I guess I don't know how cookies work, but I figured that most of the
> information that cookies provide would still be provided even if you
> delete them right away.  But piping things to /dev/null is just fun
> anyway, so that's all that matters to me.  :) 

I'll give you that - /dev/null is cool. :)

> FYI, I probably won't be able to attend the LUCI meetings for a while
> because I am taking a class on tuesday night.  :(  I'll try to be more 
> annonying via luci-discuss to make up for my absence, though.   

Me too (as if I've made it to any meetings yet anyway).

--Danny, quite pleased that he finally got sendmail working (SUsE makes it
	easier)


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