cookies in engish?!

greetings-

what is the most advanced cookie that companies are using right now? what specifically can they track? computer information etc...

is it possible to decrypt cookies?

i am fairly new to cookies and any information would be most helpful. Thanks-

-ob

 

gotcha-

so for instance, you go to amazon and they drop a cookie that i understand is a text file that may be edited in the future. it seta information only and does not extract information from the users computer?

thansk for the quick response

-ob

 

Cookies are opaque bits of information handled by browsers the only way possible - they match the domain name stored in the cookie and send the cookie back to the server if the domain name is right. Browsers don't look at what's inside cookies.

However, it's important to understand that since the server is the one providing cookies, some server-side applications may be poorly written and may put too much information into cookies. For example, some applications store user name in a cookie, instead of storing it server-side and matching a unique ID stored in the cookie with the one stored on the server. Other cases are possible as well, so that if somebody else views your cookies (e.g. on a shared computer), they may be able to obtain some information about you.

Decrypting cookies. Not all cookies contain encrypted information - some may be just plain text and some may be some random number identifying the visitor (not visitor's identity, just the fact that it's the same visitor). There are programs that will try to find cookie pattern, so that the person running these programs can predict the next cookie value. If they do, they can hijack somebody's session and impersonate that user with all the consequences.

J.D.

 

Think of cookies as merely a place where the web server can store some of its session variables. They can't contain malicious code, viruses, or anything else. They are almost always just a customer ID, shopping cart ID, session ID, or something similar that the web application needs to keep track of each user.

 

thanks for making things a little clearer. can i track the ip address with cookies?

 

Are you talking about dealing with cookies on the client side or the server side?

J.D.