Cookies, privacy, mIm

[James Klock]

At 07:16 AM 6/9/98 -0700, <cherry at banjo.com> wrote:
>One problem which does arise is that each file on a Windows-95/98 system
>(normal FAT) occupies an entire cluster (32K Bytes) and thus even though
the >cookies themselves are small, they can fill up one's disk since
hundreds of >these nuisances occupy considerable disk space.

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).  

So, no, disk space is not a problem.  Security?  Privacy?  Those are
different issues, with potentially serious opportunities for exploitation
(though I readily note that I have yet to see any attempt at an
implemetation of a serious security/privacy breach using cookies).  To be
on the safe side, we wipe our public cookies files between user sessions,
and sleep just a bit easier for it.

James