Cookies, privacy, mIm

[Stephen H. Spohn, Jr.]

I'm not sure of the side effects, but I've done this before.  Don't know how
it affects *necessary cookies for databases.  I imagine that they stay in
*memory until Netscape is shutdown and it goes to rewrite the file.  (I've
done the same thing with bookmarks.)

Set the cookies.txt file to read-only.

James Klock wrote:

> 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



--
Stephen H. Spohn, Jr.
Johnson Center Library, George Mason University
703.993.9055
http://mason.gmu.edu/~sspohnjr/