[thelist] Truth about cookies?

[Raymond Camden]

> Another reason cookies have gotten bad press is because of 
> the security 
> threats caused by stupid developers, who have been known to 
> store things 
> like username/password pairs in cookies.  That's just plain silly!  
> Cookies ought to store unique session identifiers.
> 

Actually, I've always thought that the reason cookies got such bad press
is that when they were introduced, the users were NOT given the tools to
properly manage them. For example, I remember that if you edited the
cookies file in Netscape, and didn't do it correctly, Netscape would
just nuke the file. There was no easy way to browse and manage your
cookies. Plus, the options: No cookies, All cookies, or "Prompt for each
of the 1 million cookies sent to me" were really not developed enough.
If Netscape had been a bit more responsible about how it introduced them
(I believe they were the first browser to use them), then maybe we
wouldn't have the problems we do today.

=======================================================================
Raymond Camden, Principal Spectra Compliance Engineer for Macromedia

Email    : jedimaster at macromedia.com
Yahoo IM : morpheus

"My ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is." - Yoda