-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- On Wed, 17 Jul 1996, Jeff Barber wrote:
I think you're exactly right about how cookies are used, but I believe privacy concerns stemming from cookies have been blown out of proportion lately. For the average Joe User running his single-user PC at home, connected by modem to his local ISP, it makes little difference whether a site issues a cookie to Joe or not; his IP address already uniquely distinguishes him. The site can simply use his IP address as its database index. If Joe deletes his cookie file each night before invoking the browser, the impact of cookies is completely negated.
That's not entirely correct. Cookies can be used to establish the route a person used to get from one page to the next. Of course, this can also be done by using the "HTTP-REFERER:" header, but some servers might not have that capability. - -- Mark PGP encrypted mail prefered Key fingerprint = d61734f2800486ae6f79bfeb70f95348 http://www.voicenet.com/~markm/ -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3 Charset: noconv iQCVAwUBMe7PI7Zc+sv5siulAQHNuAP+Ou5n+NA5Ij+mra6MaDGBajHzX+f7y8nT 9w/GSGcvIMyTVY3tVklH6i1JpF00qcMG1JYFPrzdc//w8a88tK10/Hnj9j62PzUQ jqgcoPcoEmZMZK46chlaffeZcLMGb1CJvOMzNjJ12UJxuqEUYcLLX9rsSmjlZLzX 4gob7M0DMtM= =0+TI -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----