Archived from groups: microsoft.public.windowsxp.newusers (
More info?)
>-----Original Message-----
>thank map...so it is okay to delete them all? What
exactly are they for?
>.
>
By: Viktor Mayer-Schönberger
The WWW is built on a very simple, but powerful premise.
All material on the Web is formatted in a general,
uniform format called HTML (Hypertext Markup Language),
and all information requests and responses conform to a
similarly standard protocol. When someone accesses a
server on the Web, such as the Library of Congress, the
user's Web browser will send an information request to
the Library of Congress' computer. This computer is
called a Web server. The Web server will respond to the
request by transmitting the desired information to the
user's computer. There, the user's browser will display
the received information on the user's screen.
Cookies are pieces of information generated by a Web
server and stored in the user's computer, ready for
future access. Cookies are embedded in the HTML
information flowing back and forth between the user's
computer and the servers. Cookies were implemented to
allow user-side customization of Web information. For
example, cookies are used to personalize Web search
engines, to allow users to participate in WWW-wide
contests (but only once!), and to store shopping lists of
items a user has selected while browsing through a
virtual shopping mall.
Essentially, cookies make use of user-specific
information transmitted by the Web server onto the user's
computer so that the information might be available for
later access by itself or other servers. In most cases,
not only does the storage of personal information into a
cookie go unnoticed, so does access to it. Web servers
automatically gain access to relevant cookies whenever
the user establishes a connection to them, usually in the
form of Web requests.
Cookies are based on a two-stage process. First the
cookie is stored in the user's computer without their
consent or knowledge. For example, with customizable Web
search engines like My Yahoo!, a user selects categories
of interest from the Web page. The Web server then
creates a specific cookie, which is essentially a tagged
string of text containing the user's preferences, and it
transmits this cookie to the user's computer. The user's
Web browser, if cookie-savvy, receives the cookie and
stores it in a special file called a cookie list. This
happens without any notification or user consent. As a
result, personal information (in this case the user's
category preferences) is formatted by the Web server,
transmitted, and saved by the user's computer.
During the second stage, the cookie is clandestinely and
automatically transferred from the user's machine to a
Web server. Whenever a user directs her Web browser to
display a certain Web page from the server, the browser
will, without the user's knowledge, transmit the cookie
containing personal information to the Web server.
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