CookieScan 0.0 rev 0

Rabid Wombat wombat at mcfeely.bsfs.org
Wed Jul 17 12:04:39 PDT 1996




> >Christopher Hull wrote:
> >> What I imagine is a little utility that would
> >> display the cookies stashed on a machine and
> >> give the user the option to either delete or
> >> <snicker> edit </snicker> any given cookie.
> >> (Hey, it¹s *your* computer, not the website¹s).
> >
> >  I doubt that you will have much luck here.  Many (most??) sites
> >that use cookies tend to encode or obscure them so that they are not
> >human readable.  Certainly anyone doing something questionable
> >will obscure their cookies so that they will not be user readable
> >or editable.
> >
> I agree.  Editing is problematic.
> 

Yes, editing is difficult, often a trial-and-error effort if you don't 
know what the site is looking for. You generally end up with a cookie 
that is ignored by the server, which then acts as though no cookie were 
involved.

I have yet to see a "damaging" cookie, outside of the stupidity of trying 
to pass a plain-text password across the 'net for storage on the client. 
Anybody seen any interesting problematic cookies?

- r.w.







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