13oots2 said:
The cookie blocking feature really impressed me. If I want to give info out, I can now choose easily. Plus I like the new icons in Win2K, little things and all that
You people all have the wrong impression about cookies.
Cookies can NOT read any of your info.... PERIOD! It's just a text file that's stored on your harddrive. Cookies are ONLY readable in the domain they were set in. In other words. Cookies set here on the forums store your login and password. This Data is retrieved from the database when you log in. Each page you load looks for a cookie from forums.overclockers.ws and if it's there, it reads the login and password so you don't have to keep logging in. It also stores what pages you read and what posts you read. That's why it must re-set the cookie on each page. This is so it can track read and un-read posts.
Those are "good" cookies. Now for the "Bad" cookies.
Cookies can be used to track your movement through the web but ONLY if the page has an imbedded page from the domain that sets the cookie.
www.overclockers.au or even
www.overclockers.com can NOT read your cookie set here at forums.overclockers.ws. The browser just won't let that happen.
The way tracking cookies work is this:
Page 1 has a Banner from ads.doubleclick.net on it. It sets a cookie valid in the Domain ads.doubleclick.net. Now ANY page you visit that has a Banner from doubleclick can read that doubleclick cookie and say "Hey this guy was here and here and here". BUT, it cannot read your harddrive and give out any information from it. These are BAD cookies! This is why the Banner Ads here are served up by the same domain as the forums. We don't want people tracking you.
This is the push for cookie privacy. Not because they can STEAL information but Ad companys use them to track what sites you hit. As I said, the sites must run a banner from that domain though.
Now, if I wanted to spy, I'd just embed some nasty Javascript or VB script in the page
That's a whole new lesson.
