| An Internet
site's way of keeping track of you. It's a small program built into
pages you may visit. It can identify you, track sites you visit, and
topics you search. You can set your browser to warn you before you
accept cookies or not accept them at all.
A cookie is information that a
Web site puts on your hard disk so that it can remember something
about you at a later time. (More technically, it is information for
future use that is stored by the server on the client side of a
client/server communication.) Typically, a cookie records your
preferences when using a particular site. Using the Web's Hypertext
Transfer Protocol (HTTP), each request for a Web page is independent
of all other requests. For this reason, the Web page server has no
memory of what pages it has sent to a user previously or anything
about your previous visits. A cookie is a mechanism that allows the
server to store its own information about a user on the user's own
computer. You can view the cookies that have been stored on your
hard disk (although the content stored in each cookie may not make
much sense to you). The location of the cookies depends on the
browser. Internet Explorer stores each cookie as a separate file
under a Windows subdirectory. Netscape stores all cookies in a
single cookies.txt fle. Opera stores them in a single cookies.dat
file. |
