Cookies, privacy, mIm

[Bob Cherry]

At 08:39 AM 6/9/98 -0700, James Klock wrote:
>Surely you mean 32 bytes (not Kilobytes, or just over three orders of
>magnitude larger).  And the last I checked, my cookies (per Netscape
>3.x/4.x) are all kept in a single file (cookies.txt).  In fact, at the
>moment, that file is 10,039 bytes, and contains approximately 120 cookies.
>In fact, a typical cookie (which is just ANSI text) is just under 100
>characters long (and thus about 100 bytes, or 1/10 of a Kb, or less than
>1/10,000 of a MB, or less than 1/10,000,000 of my relatively small, 1 GB
>hard drive). 

No, each cluster is 32,768 Bytes!!  Not just 32 bytes!  The file size indicated is the true file size but the file occupies a complete FAT logical cluster.  IE places each cookie onto the disk as a seperate file.  This is also true for cached HTML pages, etc.  Every file on a Windows system occupies clusters.  As such, a 33K file actually occupies 2*32K file space since it is greater than one and less than two.

Bob Cherry
Internet Networking Consultant