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Microcap & Penny Stocks : Zulu-tek, Inc. (ZULU) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Fredman who wrote (6854)	5/10/1998 1:41:00 AM
From: Jon Tara	Respond to of 18444

Fred, I'm not sure where you change Netscape's behaviour to not constantly ask about cookies like that. I couldn't find it in "Security", and that is NOT the default action. The default is to simply accept cookies. I don't find anything objectionable about cookies. They are NOT a way of looking at your system. ALL a cookie does is store information on your computer between sessions at a web site. Site A has no way of looking at Site B's cookies. And a cookie can't reveal anything about you EXCEPT for your previous visits to the same site. Now, that said, keep in mind that parts of a web page can come from different sites. Ads quite often come from the ad company's site. They use cookies for "tracking". They assign you a unique number the first time you see one of their ads, and then use that number to count how many times you've seen their ads, what ads you've seen, what sites you saw their ads on, etc. (The latter doesn't come from the cookie, per se, but from information typically encoded into the URL that fetches the ad banner. Add the cookie info, and the ad company can track where you've been.) It's not really as bad as it sounds, because the ad company does NOT know who you are, unless you fill out a form somewhere and TELL them who you are. I don't find it terribly objectionable, as the information is primarly used by the ad companies for reporting purposes (they have to tell their advertisers how many unique people see their ads, etc.) And I'd rather see targeted ads than ones that I have no interest in whatsoever. Cookies can be used, for example, to save preferences. So, SI could remember whether your prefer to view messages in forward or reverse order. This saves them from having to store this stuff on their site. Or, they might save the preferences on their site, but then use the cookie to assign you a unique ID. When you visit the site again, it looks at the ID and fetches your preferences. Cookies can also be used as a substitute for a log in and password on membership-only sites. For example, the Wall Street Journal and New York Times both use this technique now (optionally) instead of log-ins.