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Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies

School of Theoretical Physics

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School of Theoretical Physics

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What is a cookie?

A cookie is a small piece of data stored on your computer on behalf of a remote website. That site can then request the cookie back later, and can use it to recognise previous visitors. Unfortunately, the same mechanism can be used to track a user from website to website without their knowledge, building up a profile. This is widely considered to be obnoxious behaviour, and most browsers give control over how cookies are managed.

Badly coded sites

Some sites will not function properly, if they cannot set and retrieve cookies. A well-coded website will chek to see if cookies can be set, and pop up an explicit warning if the test cookie is rejected. Unfortunately, some sites simply assume cookies can be set, never do a check, and fail in unexpected ways if cookies are off, or the specific cookie request has been denied.

Some examples of sites that need cookies, but don't say so, and misbehave without explanation if cookies are not permitted:
  • www.swetswise.com
  • www.ria.ie

Mozilla

Go to Edit, Preferences, Privacy & Security, and then Cookies. The suggested settings here are:
  • "Allow cookies for the originating web site only", and
  • "Accept for current session only".
The first should permit all legitimate uses while preventing the crudest forms of web-tracking. The second allows you to browse normally but the cookie information is deleted when you close the browser. If you have a subscription to a particular website, the site may wish to keep a long term cookie, so in this case you will need to "Accept cookies normally", you will have to use a less restrictive setting.

Note: If you have explicitly blocked a site from setting a cookie, and now find it doesn't work without them, you can choose Cookie Manager and then Cookie Sites to remove an individual block.

Mozilla Firefox

Depending on version, the configuration controls are either in Tools and then Options, or Edit then Preferences. In either case, one of the options is directly labelled Cookies.

The controls are quite similar to those in Mozilla. One improvement is that it is easy to add site-specific exceptions to any general policy.

Konqueror

The configuration controls are in Settings, then Configure Konqueror, one of the options is directly labelled Cookies.

Again, the control options are roughly similar to Mozilla and Mozlla-Firefox.

Help!

Send a mail to me or call in to 302.
File last modified: Wednesday, 17-May-2006 18:00:20 IST