You are letting you imagination (and lack of knowledge) run away with
you Tony.
Unix is an operating system that is meant to be ran all of the time
instead of being shutdown a lot. OS-X like most Unixes needs to do
housekeeping on a regular basis. it keeps a lot of records of what it
does during the day in various log files, and these can get very large,
so it takes care of that by compressing them and rotating the old ones
out of the way. This takes processor time so it does this late at night
when most folks are not using the system. Also It checks the status of
running operations and cleans things up when it finds a problem. This
is also part of the housekeeping stuff.
Cookies do a lot of things besides store you passwords. Shopping carts
come quickly to mind, one way is to store the cart info on a server, a
very slow and error prone way of doing things, cookies make this easy
and almost trouble free. In addition, they can be used to have security
in web-sites where it is needed. You do not need to connect to the
internet, EVER, to turn over private information to some group of
government turncoats to lose it, large chunks of your private medical
and financial information is freely swapped now between various
corporations.
Jerry
On Apr 21, 2004, at 8:08 PM, Tony LaFemina wrote:
> Henri Yandell wrote:
>
>> Cookies are useful for remembering passwords, if the site itself
>> offers to
>> remember them and not the browser, or just to remember who you are.
>>
>> They're also quite essential in maintaining a stateful session with a
>> server so that you don't have to tell it who you are every time you
>> hit a
>> button. There are other ways to do this, but cookies are the preferred
>> approach.
>>
>> I think it's rare to store information in a cookie. Usually it would
>> just
>> contain an id to represent you.
>>
>> I like the old Camino browser which forces you to agree to let a site
>> set
>> cookies in the future. That way you can block the advert sites and
>> allow
>> the site you really went to.
>>
>> Hen
>>
>>
> Hi Henri
>
> You may not be one of them, but I think there are a few on the list
> that are security conscious. I never understood the reasoning behind
> it since a computer is probably one of the most insecure devices you
> could possibly own, unless you only use it for personal use and have
> no link to the outside world.
>
> I think it's safe to assume everyone on the list has an internet
> connection of some sort. That alone makes it insecure to some extent.
> For those that spend most of their time on the internet, I believe
> security is totally out the window. On another note, for those of you
> using any version of the new OS, I was led to believe that the OS runs
> programs at odd hours, for whatever reason, if your Mac is always left
> on. Maybe I'm stupid, but what's the need for that? Does the OS need
> assurances from Apple in order to be on its best behavior?
>
> As far as cookies go, you mention storing passwords. Why would any
> security conscious person want somebody or something else storing that
> kind of information? You also mention a cookie remembering who you
> are. If that were the case, why bother storing passwords? There's
> still too much I don't know, to willingly toss around private
> information without knowing what's going on. For those on the list who
> may not be aware of it, information happens to be a hot commodity. I
> for one, believe there are people in critical areas of business and
> government that wouldn't lose a nights sleep over selling lists of
> valuable information to eager buyers.
>
> --
> Tony LaFemina
> When you want to do more than just buy software
> http://hometown.aol.com/visitmacland/index.html
> mailto:remacs at optonline.net
>
>
>
>
>
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>
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