A cookie (also tracking cookie, browser cookie, and HTTP cookie) is a small piece of text stored on a user's computer by a web browser A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content. Hyperlinks present in resources enable users to easily navigate their browsers to. A cookie consists of one or more name-value pairs A name–value pair or attribute–value pair is a fundamental data representation in computing systems and applications. Designers often desire an open-ended data structure that allows for future extension without modifying existing code or data. In such situations, all or part of the data model may be expressed as a collection of tuples < containing bits of information.
The cookie is sent as an HTTP The Hypertext Transfer Protocol is an Application Layer protocol for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems header by a web server A web server is a computer program that delivers content, such as web pages, using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), over the World Wide Web. The term web server can also refer to the computer or virtual machine running the program to a web browser and then sent back unchanged by the browser each time it accesses that server. A cookie can be used for authentication Authentication is the act of establishing or confirming something (or someone) as authentic, that is, that claims made by or about the subject are true ("authentification" is a French language variant of this word). This might involve confirming the identity of a person, tracing the origins of an artifact, ensuring that a product is what, session tracking (state In computer science and automata theory, a state is a unique configuration of information in a program or machine. It is a concept that occasionally extends into some forms of systems programming such as lexers and parsers maintenance), storing site preferences, shopping cart Shopping cart software is software used in e-commerce to assist people making purchases online, analogous to the American English term 'shopping cart'. In British English it is generally known as a shopping basket, almost exclusively shortened on websites to 'basket' contents, the identifier for a server-based session In human-computer interaction, session management is the process of keeping track of a user's activity across sessions of interaction with the computer system, or anything else that can be accomplished through storing textual data.
As text, cookies are not executable In computing, an executable file causes a computer "to perform indicated tasks according to encoded instructions," as opposed to a data file that must be parsed by a program to be meaningful. These instructions are traditionally machine code instructions for a physical CPU. However, in a more general sense, a file containing instructions. Because they are not executed, they cannot replicate themselves and are not viruses A computer virus is a computer program that can copy itself and infect a computer. The term "virus" is also commonly but erroneously used to refer to other types of malware, including but not limited to adware and spyware programs that do not have the reproductive ability. A true virus can spread from one computer to another when its. Due to the browser mechanism to set and read cookies, they can be used as spyware Spyware is a type of malware that can be installed on computers and collects little bits of information at a time about users without their knowledge. The presence of spyware is typically hidden from the user, and can be difficult to detect. Typically, spyware is secretly installed on the user's personal computer. Sometimes, however, spywares such. Anti-spyware products may warn users about some cookies because cookies can be used to track people or violate privacy concerns.
Most modern browsers allow users to decide whether to accept cookies, and the time frame to keep them, but rejecting cookies makes some websites unusable.
Contents |
History
The term "cookie" derives from "magic cookie A magic cookie or just cookie for short, is a token or short packet of data passed between communicating programs, where the data is typically not meaningful to the recipient program. The contents are opaque and not usually interpreted until the recipient passes the cookie data back to the sender or perhaps another program at a later time. The", which is a packet of data a program receives and sends out again unchanged. Magic cookies were already used in computing when Lou Montulli had the idea of using them in Web communications in June 1994.[1] At the time, he was an employee of Netscape Communications Netscape Communications is a US computer services company, best known for its web browser. When it was an independent company, its headquarters were in Mountain View, California. The name Netscape was a trademark of Cisco Systems, that was granted to the company, which was developing an e-commerce Electronic commerce, commonly known as e-commerce or eCommerce, or e-business consists of the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks. The amount of trade conducted electronically has grown extraordinarily with widespread Internet usage. The use of commerce is conducted in application for a customer. Cookies provided a solution to the problem of reliably implementing a virtual shopping cart Shopping cart software is software used in e-commerce to assist people making purchases online, analogous to the American English term 'shopping cart'. In British English it is generally known as a shopping basket, almost exclusively shortened on websites to 'basket'.[2][3]
Together with John Giannandrea, Montulli wrote the initial Netscape cookie specification the same year. Version 0.9beta of Mosaic Netscape Netscape Navigator and Netscape are the names for the proprietary web browser popular in the 1990s, the flagship product of the Netscape Communications Corporation and the dominant web browser in terms of usage share, although by 2002 its usage had almost disappeared. This was partly due to the increased usage of Microsoft's Internet Explorer web, released on October 13, 1994,[4][5] supported cookies. The first use of cookies (out of the labs) was checking whether visitors to the Netscape website had already visited the site. Montulli applied for a patent for the cookie technology in 1995, and US patent 5774670 was granted in 1998. Support for cookies was integrated in Internet Explorer in version 2, released in October 1995.[6]
The introduction of cookies was not widely known to the public at the time. In particular, cookies were accepted by default, and users were not notified of the presence of cookies. Some people were aware of the existence of cookies as early as the first quarter of 1995,[7] but the general public learned about them after the Financial Times The Financial Times is a British international business newspaper. It is a morning daily newspaper published in the Borough of Southwark, London and printed at 22 sites. Its primary rival is New York City-based The Wall Street Journal published an article about them on February 12, 1996. In the same year, cookies received a lot of media attention, especially because of potential privacy implications. Cookies were discussed in two U.S. ^ b. English is the de facto language of American government and the sole language spoken at home by 80% of Americans age five and older. Spanish is the second most commonly spoken language Federal Trade Commission The Federal Trade Commission is an independent agency of the United States government, established in 1914 by the Federal Trade Commission Act. Its principal mission is the promotion of "consumer protection" and the elimination and prevention of what regulators perceive to be harmfully "anti-competitive" business practices, hearings in 1996 and 1997.
The development of the formal cookie specifications was already ongoing. In particular, the first discussions about a formal specification started in April 1995 on the www-talk mailing list. A special working group within the IETF The Internet Engineering Task Force develops and promotes Internet standards, cooperating closely with the W3C and ISO/IEC standards bodies and dealing in particular with standards of the TCP/IP and Internet protocol suite. It is an open standards organization, with no formal membership or membership requirements. All participants and managers are was formed. Two alternative proposals for introducing state in HTTP transactions had been proposed by Brian Behlendorf and David Kristol respectively, but the group, headed by Kristol himself, soon decided to use the Netscape specification as a starting point. On February 1996, the working group identified third-party cookies as a considerable privacy threat. The specification produced by the group was eventually published as RFC 2109 in February 1997. It specifies that third-party cookies were either not allowed at all, or at least not enabled by default.
At this time, advertising companies were already using third-party cookies. The recommendation about third-party cookies of RFC 2109 was not followed by Netscape and Internet Explorer. RFC 2109 was followed by RFC 2965 in October 2000.
Uses
Session management
Cookies may be used to maintain data related to the user during navigation, possibly across multiple visits. Cookies were introduced to provide a way to implement a "shopping cart Shopping cart software is software used in e-commerce to assist people making purchases online, analogous to the American English term 'shopping cart'. In British English it is generally known as a shopping basket, almost exclusively shortened on websites to 'basket'" (or "shopping basket"),[2][3] a virtual device into which users can store items they want to purchase as they navigate throughout the site.
Shopping basket applications today usually store the list of basket contents in a database on the server side, rather than storing basket items in the cookie itself. A web server typically sends a cookie containing a unique session identifier With reference to a given set of objects, a unique identifier is any identifier which is guaranteed to be unique among all identifiers used for those objects and for a specific purpose. There are three main types of unique identifiers, each corresponding to a different generation strategy:. The web browser will send back that session identifier with each subsequent request and shopping basket items are stored associated with a unique session identifier.
Allowing users to log in to a website is a frequent use of cookies. Typically the web server will first send a cookie containing a unique session identifier. Users then submit their credentials and the web application authenticates the session and allows the user access to services.
Personalization
Cookies may be used to remember the information about the user who has visited a website in order to show relevant content in the future. For example a web server may send a cookie containing the username last used to log in to a web site so that it may be filled in for future visits.
Many websites use cookies for personalization Personalization involves using technology to accommodate the differences between individuals. Once confined mainly to the Web, it is increasingly becoming a factor in education, health care , television, and in both "business to business" and "business to consumer" settings based on users' preferences. Users select their preferences by entering them in a web form and submitting the form to the server. The server encodes the preferences in a cookie and sends the cookie back to the browser. This way, every time the user accesses a page, the server is also sent the cookie where the preferences are stored, and can personalize the page according to the user preferences. For example, the Wikipedia Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 16 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, and almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site. Wikipedia was launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales website allows authenticated users to choose the webpage skin In computing, a skin is a custom graphical appearance achieved by the use of a graphical user interface which can be applied to specific software and websites to suit its the purpose, topic, or the tastes of different users. A skin may be associated with themes they like best; the Google Google Inc. is a multinational public cloud computing, Internet search, and advertising technologies corporation. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program. The company was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, often dubbed the " search engine allows users (even non-registered ones) to decide how many search results per page they want to see.
Tracking
Tracking cookies may be used to track internet users' web browsing habits. This can also be done in part by using the IP address An Internet Protocol address is a numerical label that is assigned to devices participating in a computer network, that uses the Internet Protocol for communication between its nodes. An IP address serves two principal functions: host or network interface identification and location addressing. Its role has been characterized as follows: "A of the computer requesting the page or the referer The referrer, or HTTP referrer—also known by the common misspelling referer that occurs as an HTTP header field—identifies, from the point of view of an internet webpage or resource, the address of the webpage of the resource which links to it. By checking the referrer, the new page can see where the request came from. Referrer logging is used field of the HTTP header The Hypertext Transfer Protocol is an Application Layer protocol for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems, but cookies allow for a greater precision. This can be done for example as follows:
- If the user requests a page of the site, but the request contains no cookie, the server presumes that this is the first page visited by the user; the server creates a random string and sends it as a cookie back to the browser together with the requested page;
- From this point on, the cookie will be automatically sent by the browser to the server every time a new page from the site is requested; the server sends the page as usual, but also stores the URL of the requested page, the date/time of the request, and the cookie in a log file.
By looking at the log file, it is then possible to find out which pages the user has visited and in what sequence. For example, if the log contains some requests done using the cookie id=abc, it can be determined that these requests all come from the same user. The URL and date/time stored with the cookie allows for finding out which pages the user has visited, and at what time.
Third-party cookies and Web bugs A web bug is an object that is embedded in a web page or e-mail and is usually invisible to the user but allows checking that a user has viewed the page or e-mail. One common use is in e-mail tracking. Alternative names are web beacon, tracking bug, tracking pixel, pixel tag, 1×1 gif, and clear gif, explained below, also allow for tracking across multiple sites. Tracking within a site is typically used to produce usage statistics, while tracking across sites is typically used by advertising companies to produce anonymous user profiles (which are then used to determine what advertisements should be shown to the user).
A tracking cookie may potentially infringe upon the user's privacy but they can be easily removed. Current versions of popular web browsers include options to delete 'persistent' cookies when the application is closed.
Third-party cookies
When viewing a Web page, images or other objects contained within this page may reside on servers besides just the URL shown in your browser. While rendering the page, the browser downloads all these objects. Most modern websites that you view contain information from lots of different sources. For example, if you type www.domain.com into your browser, widgets and advertisements within this page are often served from a different domain source. While this information is being retrieved, some of these sources may set cookies in your browser. First-party cookies are cookies that are set by the same domain that is in your browser's address bar. Third-party cookies are cookies being set by one of these widgets or other inserts coming from a different domain.
Modern browsers, such as Mozilla Firefox Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite and managed by Mozilla Corporation. A Net Applications statistic put Firefox at 24.59% of the recorded usage share of web browsers as of April 2010[update], making it the second most popular browser in terms of current use worldwide after Microsoft's, Internet Explorer Windows Internet Explorer , is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems starting in 1995. It has been the most widely used web browser since 1999, attaining a peak of about 95% usage share during 2002 and 2003 with IE5 and IE6 and Opera Opera is a web browser and Internet suite developed by Opera Software. The browser handles common Internet-related tasks such as displaying web sites, sending and receiving e-mail messages, managing contacts, chatting on IRC, downloading files via BitTorrent, and reading Web feeds. Opera is offered free of charge for personal computers and mobile, by default, allow third-party cookies, although users can change the settings to block them. There is no inherent security risk of third-party cookies (they do not harm the user's computer) and they make lots of functionality of the web possible, however some internet users disable them because they can be used to track a user browsing from one website to another. This tracking is most often done by on-line advertising companies to assist in targeting advertisements. For example: Suppose a user visits www.domain1.com and an advertiser sets a cookie in the user's browser, and then the user later visits www.domain2.com. If the same company advertises on both sites, the advertiser knows that this particular user who is now viewing www.domain2.com also viewed www.domain1.com in the past and may avoid repeating advertisements. The advertiser does not know anything more about the user than that—they do not know the user's name or address or any other personal information (unless they obtain it from another source such as from the user or by reading another cookie).
See misconceptions below for more details.
Implementation
A possible interaction between a Web browser and a server holding a Web page, in which the server sends a cookie to the browser and the browser sends it back when requesting another page.Cookies are arbitrary pieces of data chosen by the Web server A web server is a computer program that delivers content, such as web pages, using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), over the World Wide Web. The term web server can also refer to the computer or virtual machine running the program and sent to the browser. The browser returns them unchanged to the server, introducing a state In computer science and automata theory, a state is a unique configuration of information in a program or machine. It is a concept that occasionally extends into some forms of systems programming such as lexers and parsers (memory of previous events) into otherwise stateless HTTP transactions. Without cookies, each retrieval of a Web page A web page or webpage is a document or resource of information that is suitable for the World Wide Web and can be accessed through a web browser and displayed on a monitor or mobile device or component of a Web page is an isolated event, mostly unrelated to all other views of the pages of the same site. Other than being set by a web server, cookies can also be set by a script A scripting language, script language or extension language is a programming language that allows control of one or more software applications. "Scripts" are distinct from the core code of the application, which is usually written in a different language, and are often created or at least modified by the end-user. Scripts are often in a language such as JavaScript JavaScript is an implementation of the ECMAScript language standard and is typically used to enable programmatic access to computational objects within a host environment. It can be characterized as a prototype-based object-oriented scripting language that is dynamic, weakly typed and has first-class functions. It is also considered a functional, if supported and enabled by the Web browser.
Cookie specifications[8][9] suggest that browsers should be able to save and send back a minimal number of cookies. In particular, an internet browser is expected to be able to store at least 300 cookies of four kilobytes The kilobyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information storage or transmission. One kilobyte is most often considered to be 1024 bytes each, and at least 20 cookies per server or domain A domain name is an identification label that defines a realm of administrative autonomy, authority, or control in the Internet, based on the Domain Name System.
According to section 3.1 of RFC 2965, cookie names are case insensitive Text sometimes exhibits case sensitivity; that is, words can differ in meaning based on differing use of uppercase and lowercase letters. Words with capital letters do not always have the same meaning when written with lowercase letters. For example, Bill is the first name of former U.S. president William Clinton, who could sign a bill . And a.
The cookie setter can specify a deletion date, in which case the cookie will be removed on that date. If the cookie setter does not specify a date, the cookie is removed once the user quits his or her browser. As a result, specifying a date is a way for making a cookie survive across sessions. For this reason, cookies with an expiration date are called persistent. As an example application, a shopping site can use persistent cookies to store the items users have placed in their basket. (In reality, the cookie may refer to an entry in a database stored at the shopping site, not on your computer.) This way, if users quit their browser without making a purchase and return later, they still find the same items in the basket so they do not have to look for these items again. If these cookies were not given an expiration date, they would expire when the browser is closed, and the information about the basket content would be lost.
Cookies can also be limited in scope to a specific domain, subdomain or path on the web server which created them.
Tue, 10 Aug 2010 07:23:42 GMT+00:00
Trading Markets (press release) "But the application was specifically for categories in which we operate, including cookies and refrigerated dough products nationally. ...
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[source page]
Nasi Lemak wi Sizzling Lamb
Dennis Yeo
Wed, 04 Aug 2010 03:54:35 GM
This is a bunch of creative Facebook and Twitter . cookies. made by i_am_baker. Not the . cookies. that sit inside your browser but actual edible . cookies. that look.
Q. I need a really good frosting recipe for these cookies: could someone give me a good recipe that goes with these cookies? Thanks soo much!
Asked by :) - Sat Nov 3 16:51:32 2007 - - 8 Answers - 0 Comments
A. Icing 1 1/3 cup Crisco (transfat-free) or a 1/3 cup of softened butter 1 pound of confectioners sugar About 1/4 cup of milk 1 teaspoon of vanilla Mix icing ingredients together until smooth. Separate into different bowls, add food coloring to achieve various colors. Spread on cookies with a butter knife, use cake decorating piping equipment to add decorative accents. If you want the sprinkle type decorating candies to stick, brush the cookie with clear Karo syrup and then sprinkle. Icing 2 2 cups confectioners sugar, sifted 1/2 teaspoon almond extract 1/4 cup milk Food coloring combine sugar, almond extract and just enough milk (about 1/4 cup) to make the frosting the consistency of thin glue. Pour icing into shallow bowls wide enough… [cont.]
Answered by Cister - Sat Nov 3 16:56:20 2007
