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Internet site's way of keeping track of you. It's a
small program built into pages you may visit. It can
identify you, track sites you visit, and topics you
search. You can set your browser to warn you before
you accept cookies or not accept them at all.
A cookie is
information that a Web site puts on your hard disk
so that it can remember something about you at a
later time. (More technically, it is information for
future use that is stored by the server on the
client side of a client/server communication.)
Typically, a cookie records your preferences when
using a particular site. Using the Web's Hypertext
Transfer Protocol (HTTP), each request for a Web
page is independent of all other requests. For this
reason, the Web page server has no memory of what
pages it has sent to a user previously or anything
about your previous visits. A cookie is a mechanism
that allows the server to store its own information
about a user on the user's own computer. You can
view the cookies that have been stored on your hard
disk (although the content stored in each cookie may
not make much sense to you). The location of the
cookies depends on the browser. Internet Explorer
stores each cookie as a separate file under a
Windows subdirectory. Netscape stores all cookies in
a single cookies.txt fle. Opera stores them in a
single cookies.dat file.
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