Browser cookies.

Post #301,807 by static 1/2/09 3:48:12 AM Reply	Browser cookies. I have been in the habit for a long time of having Opera tell me about the cookies a site tries to set. Do this long enough and you recognise profiling libraries, popular frameworks and platforms. You also get to see what sites think they have a right to set a bazillion cookies when they should be able to be satisfied with one. This is a bad trend, IMO. Even Google Analytics makes multiple attempts to set its multiple cookies. You also get to see noxious practices like sites that require cookies and fail when you don't accept them (like a certain US ISP that just redirects endlessly if the cookie isn't accepted). >:-( Precious few actually tell you what's wrong and that they require them, but I can't remember any in a long time that tell you why. Who else tends to approve all the cookies a website requires? Wade. I heard from Google itself that about 7% of users reject cookies. D'ya think that's a lot? :-)
Post #301,810 by crazy 1/2/09 7:31:04 AM Reply	I eat all cookies I enable or disable javascript on a per site basis though, for speed.
Post #301,811 by mvitale 1/2/09 7:56:15 AM Reply	Manual recognition Like Wade, I perform manual recognition of all cookies. I can recognize standard libraries based on their cookie names, and see who's using external ad servers and/or Google Analytics. That's with Firefox. Safari, however, has a neat little option for cookie acceptance that's labeled "Accept cookies only from sites you navigate to (for example, not from advertisers on those sites.)" What a novel concept. This option is selected, and I now use Safari for most of my browsing. I don't get annoyed by FF popups on all sites, and I don't get cookies from sitemeter or doubleclick or whatnot. Le woo. -Mike "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin, 1759 Historical Review of Pennsylvania
Post #301,874 by static 1/3/09 2:24:23 AM Reply	That sounds like Opera's option. I have it set by default to "Accept cookies only from the site I visit". However, this is stricter than FireFox's definition of "No third-party cookies". How, I don't know. This is a known problem on the Opera forums, but I tend to agree with Opera's definition. It does cause problems, though. Probably one of the biggest ones is that Ebay uses PayPal's Omniture cookies to pass your session over when paying. Very very sneaky and I'd be surprised if Opera hadn't already contacted both companies about this abuse of "third-party" cookies. Fortunately, you only have to let them in once and it will work until you throw away the PayPal cookies. Took me a while to figure that one out. Wade.
Post #301,814 by Another Scott 1/2/09 9:01:31 AM Reply	Perhaps I don't pay as much attention as I should. I use FireFox with AdBlockPlus and on Windows depend on SpyBot Search & Destroy to block bad sites. I've also loaded NoScript but haven't spent enough time with it to know the best way to use it - I usually end up enabling all the JavaScript on the sites I need to visit anyway (though I do block remote scripts when I can). It would be nice if that were somehow more automatic. (It sounds like Safari has some nice features that I should investigate more.) I guess I just haven't worried much about cookies. I'm much more concerned about e-commerce sites keeping my CC number when I wish that they wouldn't. I'm waiting for PayPal or Amazon or ... to be hacked and to start receiving charges from some cracker in the Urals... :-( Sure, advertisers and others who set cookies can know where I've been in some cases. But has this ever been used against a person? Don't they have such a mountain of data that knowing what any particular person is doing isn't worth the trouble? Grocery stores companies already know what food I buy, whether I've bought adult diapers or personal lubricants. Insurance companies know what medical conditions I have. Drugstores know about my illnesses and chronic conditions. CC companies know what stores I frequent. If the FBI or CIA want to know where we've been on-line, wouldn't it make more sense for them to tap the wire than look at our cookies? Presumably they're still slurping up everything as it is... Inquiring minds. :-) Thanks. Cheers, Scott.
Post #301,816 by boxley 1/2/09 9:25:31 AM Reply	let the cookies in and clear data often

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