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05/16/01
Cookie, Anyone?
by Jake Davenport
Everyone's probably heard the term by now: cookie. As in, "Hon, Window's Disk Cleanup says we’ve got a megabyte of cookies on the hard disk. Do you think the crumbs are what's causing the PC to crash?"
The nightly news has done a segment or two on them, and quite a controversy has arisen in the past few years regarding their benefits and drawbacks. But really, what IS a cookie? What is a cookie used for? What good can it bring? What harm can it do? And why the heck is it called a cookie? Let’s see if we can answer those questions...
Basically, a cookie is a text file that stores information on your computer to help programs operating on websites to differentiate between you and other people. Here's how it all works:
The Internet is an enormous network made up of networks. A network is a group of computers that "talk" to one another, and the Internet allows networks to "talk" to other networks. In a traditional network environment (like maybe in your office), the computers are "aware" of one another and can potentially keep track of what the others are doing.
Unfortunately, the World Wide Web just a small fraction of the Internet, really does not have the ability to keep track of what each computer is doing. The Web, originally designed to transmit and share documents over the Internet to distributed research teams, is request-based. That is, the files (Web pages, images, etc.) sit out on the Internet somewhere (on a server computer) and browser clients (you and me) request those documents as needed. The server and client are only connected for the brief period of time that the transaction occurs: request, connect, delivery, confirmation, disconnect. Once disconnected, any other request from the same client is treated by the server as entirely new. So the server doesn't "remember" that you were there looking at page 1 when you ask for page 2.
As the Web became more sophisticated, it was clear that in order to do things like e-commerce and to build more interactive websites (like ones where you can login and do your banking) there needed to be a way to "maintain state" which is geek-speak for "remember who's connected". Cookies were invented to make that process extremely simple and yet extremely powerful.
So, in practical terms, when you go to a website that sells baby stuff the website checks to see if you have its cookie on your system. If you don't, it creates one so that, when you click the link that says "Car Seats", it knows that you've already been to the home page. If you then add a car seat to your shopping cart, it uses the cookie to give you a unique identification code of some sort so that it can remember all the things you're ordering. The processing - that is, the computer work - takes place entirely on the server. The cookie is just a storage space for that information, and it's on YOUR computer because your computer is what makes you different from everyone else.
Many people misunderstand the role of cookies and falsely believe that cookies can transmit viruses, open your computer to malicious attacks, and so on. In some cases, a cookie CAN be abused - companies can conceivably work in collusion with one another to track your movements through their sites, sharing identifiers and other codes so that they know more about you collectively. There was a big scandal last year when the world discovered that Double-Click, an Internet advertising and marketing company, was using cookies to collect personal information from people without their knowledge. In order for this to work, though, people needed to be going from one participating site to another and giving out personal information to at least one along the way.
However, cookies are not capable of executing a program (which is how a virus can get on your computer) or of opening a computer up to hackers. The primary worry you should have regarding cookies is the collection and distribution of your private information, and the easiest way to protect against misuse of information is to be careful where you give it out in the first place.
In our opinion, the benefits of cookies (e-commerce, online registrations, personalized pages, etc.) considerably outweigh their drawbacks, despite the duplicity of companies such as Double-Click. If you’re concerned, you can set your browser to refuse all cookies, or simply check out a company and their privacy/personal information policy before you give them information about you.
As to why it’s called a cookie, well, the answer is horribly boring:
According to an article written by Paul Bonner for Builder.Com on 11/18/1997:
"Lou Montulli, currently the protocols manager in Netscape's client product division, wrote the cookies specification for Navigator 1.0, the first browser to use the technology. Montulli says there's nothing particularly amusing about the origin of the name: 'A cookie is a well-known computer science term that is used when describing an opaque piece of data held by an intermediary. The term fits the usage precisely; it's just not a well-known term outside of computer science circles.'"
So there you go.
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