From: "Bunny" 
Newsgroups: 
            
lt.parallel.universes,alt.paranet.abduct,alt.paranet.metaphysics,
            
lt.paranet.paranormal,alt.paranet.psi,alt.paranet.science,alt.par
            
net.skeptic,alt.paranet.ufo,alt.paranormal,alt.paranormal.channel
     Organization: Comp.Center (RUS), U of Stuttgart, FRG
Original Date: Fri, 18 Apr 1997 17:06:04 +0200
DONT let the COOKIES DIE!!!
I need them to save my personal settings in ftpsearch!
Cookies as such are not worth the panic you put in your letter, a note
sticked to your front door can do more harm to you than cookies.
-----
Since the WWW server "forgets" about you as soon as the page is served,
there are needs to store information about previous contacts, sometimes.
A very nice application of cookies is the FTPSearch server, which allows
you to customize the settings and then saves them into a cookie on your
machine.
Other cookies, however, seem to contain some kind of ID, possibly to get
statistics on how often someone downloads beta releases and the like.
That can be a threat, right. But those statistics can be based on your
IP address as well, and you cannot avoid sending that.
There are some very smart servers out there, that hand the connection to
a special server, which collects what he needs for its statstics
database and then returns you to the original site.
I think I saw that once, when a link pointed to www.xxx and I got a
"host yyy.zzz unreachable" error quite early. THIS is certainly much
more a problem than cookies.
The only thing specified for cookies is, that a server can set them and
that it can tell the client, to whom they can be showed.
There is no specification for deleting them, but I think you can simply
open the cookies file and delete certain entries. I did not think about
the format of that file, but it depends on your browser, and it should
not be hard to make a program to view and cut that file.
Bunny
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 email:  barni@studbox.uni-stuttgart.de
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