Hello John, Friday, August 29, 2003, 6:39:56 AM, you wrote:
JRS> Isn't it a way in for virus writers to get inside your protection JRS> systems ? If you have an OS problem, as does M$ with their infamous buffer overruns, then yes. (Ignoring social hacking, of course.) Otherwise, the 'virus' is limited to what can be done in, say, javascript. JRS> How safe is a cookie directory ? The dir is OK, as are the contents, from a security view. From a privacy view, it might have a great deal of info about you. Users who do nothing about cookies and surf for years may have HUGE quantities of cookies. One could learn quite a lot about you from analyzing those cookies. Such detailed dossiers are worth money. JRS> And in anycase why do we want to let other folk plant things on JRS> our hard drive. In general, we don't. JRS> Sure some email stores insist on having cookies enabled ,else JRS> they will not let you shop. Hard luck for them, go some place JRS> else, that do let you sho without enabling cookies. Cookies are very likely required for almost all shopping. Keeping a cookie for a short shopping session is probably not a high risk - just get rid of it when you're done. In Opera, for example, you can flush all cookies automatically at the end of a session. This assumes a trustworthy site, of course. Some merchants can't resist the extra income from selling your info, though. Beware of cookies on supposedly secure pages, for example. JS can read your personal info and send it back to the advertiser, and the merchant collects a fee. Advertisers are especially interested in this because it provides a 'face' to the 'non-personal' info in your huge cookie collection - now they know exactly whose name to put on the dossier. -- rikona mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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