On Mon, Feb 14, 2000 at 05:35:13AM -0600, Harmon Seaver wrote:
> Reese wrote:
>
> > I didn't bother to check - I delete any and all cookies, at regular and
> > frequent intervals,,,
> >
>
> I used to run a nightly cron job that deleted my cookies
Deleting your cookie files doesn't keep them from tracking
you in between deletions. It just gives you a warm fuzzy.
>, but that
> presents a different problem -- such as deleting the mp3.com cookies means
> that I have to re-register every time I go there, which sometimes is daily.
Right. There _IS_ a legitimate use of cookies.
> Likewise deleting the amazon cookies means that the the partial orders in my
> shopping cart disappear. Neither is a big deal, I guess, but annoying.
Fortunately there are solutions to this problem- a number of people
have written programs that can be used to seletively accept cookies.
I wrote one, "Junkbuster" is another, and I'm sure that a 10 minute
web search would find more. Mine and Junkbuster can also be
used to block ad URLs, which is pretty handy for just about any
web site these days-- saves on download time and you don't have
to ignore the spinning flaming logos.
www.lne.com/ericm/cookie_jar
> One other thing on the doubleclick optout page -- after you get your
> cookie "fixed", it has a button that says "Close Window". Clicking on this
> starts a java applet on my machine which crashes Netscape -- anybody know what
> this is about? Obviously, "close window" is a trojan something -- they don't
> need to run an applet on my machine to close a window on their website.
cookie_jar will selectively block stuff enclosed in <SCRIPT> tags
but there's a lot of other ways to send javascript/activeX.
It's an open-source project, contributions are welcome.
--
Eric Murray www.lne.com/~ericm ericm at the site lne.com PGP keyid:E03F65E5
