What’s
All The Fuss About Cookies?
Some cookies are beneficial. If you indicate that you would like your password remembered by a particular website, the website’s software installs a cookie that it can then look up the next time you visit. Some cookies are temporary, and stay resident in your computer’s memory, or as a temporary file on the hard drive, only as long as you remain logged into that site. These are known as “session cookies”. A good example of this is when you pay bills online, transfer money between bank accounts or make a purchase using your web browser.
Bad Cookies
Some websites are less than up-front about cookies and how or for what they are used. Many, many websites install cookies that track websites you visit and, whenever you are connected to the internet, transmit this information to the “cookie provider.” These are known as, oddly enough, tracking cookies. Even though these cookies provide usage-trend data to web developers, they can also make you the recipient of unsolicited targeted commercial email (pronounced “spam”). They also steal transmission bandwidth from you – while they’re transmitting, they decrease your valuable communications rate.
There is also a type of cookie referred to as “malware” can be pretty harmful. These cookies actually insert or change entries in the computer’s registry. You may suddenly find that your selected browser homepage has suddenly changed, or that preferences and options that you had set in some programs are no longer the way you set them. This is also the type of cookie that some hackers use to open up your computer for access by creating “ports”, or channels, every time you start up.
So what can be done about cookies?
I recommend, as a minimum, a two-step approach: (1) take control of the way your browser handles cookies, and (2) install a monitoring & cleanup program.
Step 1. Take Control Of The Way Your Browser Handles
Cookies
(Note:
This step applies to Internet Explorer version 5.5.1 and later.)
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In Internet Explorer, open the Tools menu and select Internet Options…
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Click on the Privacy tab. (See Illustration)
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Under Settings, click on the Advanced button. (See Illustration)
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Click in the check box labeled “Override automatic cookie handling” (so that the box has a check-mark in it) and then select the choice marked “Prompt” under both “1st Party Cookies” and “3rd Party Cookies.” Click OK, and then OK again to exit the process. (See Illustration)
This will prompt you whenever a website attempts to download a cookie. You will have an opportunity to allow or block the cookie, and additionally, apply your choice to that website always (this way, you aren’t bugged about cookies every time you visit that site.)
If you decide you’d like to change your choice about cookies from a particular website, follow the first 3 steps above, and in the advanced settings area, select edit. (Go to illustration). Find the website in the listing, double click it (so that it appears in the window labeled “Address of web site” and select either Allow or Block, then “OK” your way back out. (See illustration.)
Step 2. Get Rid of Existing Bad Cookies – And
Keep Them Out!
If you surf the Internet, use email, or visit newsgroups, you may have thousands (yes, thousands) of unnecessary tracking and malware cookies hiding out on your hard drive and in your operating system registry. If you get rid of these, and keep them out, your system will be safer, and, as a bonus you’ll be surprised at how much faster it will operate.
There are several good programs out there, but this one that Woodham Class of '69 member Marilyn Ulen told me about is really great: It’s free, it can be updated with the newest cookie “signatures” (much like and anti-virus program), it checks both the registry and the hard drives, and it can be configured. Be aware that the free version isn’t active at all times - You decide when to run it.
It’s called “Ad-Aware”, and it’s from a Swedish/German firm called LavaSoft. For those who are not involved in the industry, LavaSoft has been around for a long time, has an excellent reputation, and a lot of their research into Linux, TCP/IP, and HTML has been incorporated into the infrastructure of the internet.
I’ve provided a link button on this page to their download site for you.
Feel Free to contact me with any questions or comments.
Web Keeper
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