Saturday, March 12, 2011

How cookies can stay with you forever...

I'm pretty sure you know the story on cookies that you eat at the holidays, so this is about those other cookies. You know, the ones your computer gobbles up when you are not looking. What? My computer does cookies too? But here is something I observed just a night or two ago while entering one of my two favorite games over at Facebook. If you know me, you probably know that a lot of my discretionary time is wasted that way now.

A while back we were having trouble while in our Yahoo mail accounts, with a warning message that came up from our internet provider about a dangerous site. The interesting thing was that there is a little check by safe site inside Yahoo, so clearly something else was triggering the alert. My dh and I used to be fairly nimble and quick at computers, although I could tell a few stories about our early days that might make you giggle. Just one and then on to the point. When we got our first PC set up, I was 100% a MAC/Apple user and lover! Did Appleworks spreadsheet on one of the early 2Cs!(just bragging and none too good at it, but hey, was a mindblowing program for me at that point. Manual was written for geeks -definitely not for grade school teachers)  So anyway, one of us, won't tell who, switched off the toolbars inside Word, just clicking around... and requested the other of us to restore them. Well... how the heck do you do that? Might as well have been a CRAY running linneux.... and I don't even know if that is a possibility. Think I got that fragment of might be knowledge from watching Golden Eye(Bond, James Bond ♥) That exploration cost $30. for the book at BookStop, plus whatever else I picked up making the trip....

ANYWAY, hope you skipped ahead if you found the story lame. We reconfigured our Firefox Browser, so that every new cookie has to be approved by the user as presented. NOW here was something that AMAZED me. As soon as I accepted a cookie for one of the game pages set to expire at the end of the session, a veritable blizzard of other cookies from the same site were INCOMING!!!!!!!  Most of those cookies expired in anywhere from 1 year to 9 years.  So if your computer is slowing down, it might be bloated with cookies. On Firefox you go to Tools/options/privacy. If you can't read a pathname, don't just click around or you may have to go buy a $30 or more book. Just saying....

1 comment:

Julia said...

Yeah, there's more to cookies than the sugar kind. JB