Friday, August 9, 2013

Cookies Defined

Cookies. The World Wide Wide is designed to be an anonymous environment. For instance, when you connect to most Web pages, you aren't asked for a username and password the way you are when you log onto your Email account. Typically, when you request a page, the server that supplies the page takes little interest in who is asking, but just pushes that page back to you. This works fine the majority of the time, but sometimes it is useful for a page to remember something about you. For instance, you may have gone to fill out a form on the Web and discovered that some of your information has already been filled in. Chances are that that was performed by a cookie
A cookie is bit of data that is stored in a cookie file in your browser's directory. This file (and only this file) can be modified when a page requests a change or addition. The page can only request changes specific to that page, i.e., one page cannot change the cookie settings for another page.

Typically a cookie will save things like a user name or other frequently used information that a visitor doesn't want to re-enter each time they visit a site. The cookie file can't be read from anywhere but the machine it resides on, so there is no security risk from someone getting a hold of this information. 

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