Re: turn off cookies?

The quick answer is (which I find both somewhat lacking and lame but also somewhat blissful on many occasions) is that the lower your setting, the more potential you have for receiving various types of cookies, any of which may or may not be harmful and/or invasive of your web privacy.

The long answer is, to be honest with you, even after having worked in and with computers for nearly 25 years, I really do not know much in dept techie detail about what all is going on with cookies, how/why they are used. About all I'm good for on this topic is repeating the same mostly lame answer that a lot of tech people quote on cookies. Cookies are always talked about as necessary tiny bits of info that web site/server loads into your computer browser and memory (and registry from windows OS, not sure where they may get hidden on Unix or other platforms). To me the only reason they are necessary is it just turns out this is the way the web has been designed as it's evolved. For instance, ever notice how a web site link will turn from blue to purple after you've visited the site once? This is because the occurance of your visit is stored in a little chunk of data in memory and I think they do this via a cookie[s]. Ever notice how purple links go back to blue after you clear out your cookies and temp files?

Anyway, whether or not cookies are really necessary or not, the web (servers and browsers) has been designed to utilize them. Not all cookies are equal, some are good, some are not, I really do not know where the twain meet, but the fact that your windows browser has a sliding scale to select what level of cookies you want to allow at least demonstrates that there are several levels of cookies involved, at any of these levels some of them are probably harmless (how do we know which ones?), some of them are used for tracking your movements through the web kinda like really low octane spy-ware. The best I can tell is, the lower you set your scale, the more wide open you are to cookies. And, I know a variety of web apps - audio, video, gaming, etc, requires cookies to be lowered or in some cases completely disabled (IE> wide open). Again, is this necessary? I don't think so, but, it's just the way the web has evolved. These various appls generally communicate using specific port numbers, like TCP ports, UDP ports, etc, which in turn often times requires you to open up holes in your firewall in order for them to work (IE> making you even a bit more wide open security wise). Web geeks, hackers/crackers, other gurus and or delving into your own research/training on web design will do a much better job of explaining the details of cookies in easy to under stand language. It is at this point I sort of prefer the quick answer myself. Tweet