| Definition of Cookies |
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Cookies were designed by Netscape in 1995 to store private information about a web user such as login name, preferences, shopping cart items, and even passwords. Cookies get their name from UNIX objects called "magic cookies", which are tokens attached to a program that change based on user input. Cookies may be referred to as "persistent cookies" because they remain on the user's hard drive for long periods of time. Cookies were designed to be secure by only providing access to the web server that created them. Cookies can be used by any web server and may be updated with form input and click selections at any time unknown to the user.
In the context of today's internet and browser versions, cookies are small text files that are deposited on the client-side hard drive by specific scripting language on a webpage. These cookies store textual data about identification and internet surfing behavior. In Windows, cookies usually abide in the C:\Windows\Cookies directory when they come from Internet Explorer. Netscape apparently stores all cookie information in one file called "cookies.txt" located at C:\Program Files\Netscape\Users\
Cookies can be set in any scripting language on any website on any web server. Unless your browser is specially configured to warn you about cookies, cookies work invisibly behind the scenes without of the user's consent. Cookies may be used to store passwords, instead of using a web server's database, which is inherently less secure. Cookies have a positive benefit for the web servers that implement them in that they use memory on the client-side instead of the server-side. The size and number of cookies that may be maintained by a web server, therefore, is virtually limitless.
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