Cookies

A recent europeen law requests website editors to provide information about the cookies placed in the visitor’s web browsers while surfing the web. I’ll confess I’m not so pleased seeing these ribbons spoiling the screen, however, it is not bad to inform visitors who aren’t much aware about the web techniques, so they are not wronged in any way.

You can probably add an advanced cookie manager to your favorite web browser, as a plugin. For instance, for Mozilla Firefox, there exist a certain number of them:

Excerpt from the ec.europa.eu website:

Websites mainly use cookies to:

• identify users
• remember users’ custom preferences
• help users complete tasks without having to re‑enter information when browsing from one page to another or when visiting the site later.

Cookies can also be used for online behavioural target advertising and to show adverts relevant to something that the user searched for in the past.

The Cookies Used

I am not an expert in the matter, so I did a test to discover what are the cookies placed by Orditux.org in my web browsers. To do this I selected the CookieKeeper plugin, (because some cookies are important to keep, such as the ones installed in the web browser when connecting to the websites of some administrations).

Once installed and configured, this plugin allows to display the cookies added to the computer, then I can search into the Firefox profile folder to get an idea about what they do.

I prior had to disconnect from the admin board, then remove all cookies allowing for a start fresh as a visitor who would just have arrived on the website, in order to be able to do the following screen-shots, to illustrate this page.

Just landed on the page

If you have installed the same cookie manager plugin, you will find this information about the cookies installed by each website visited. You can also inspect each cookie individually, and attempt to guess their use.

When refusing cookies

Session cookie

What is the cookie with the strange name doing? What does it do in my computer?

I did a research in my user profile folder, and found these values in the files of the sessionstore-backups sub-directory.

It appears it lets the Firefox web browser know it has to restore that page, depending on specific events: if the browser crashes, if it is updated (and hence needs a restart), in any case if the session needs to be restored.

Here is a typical suite of characters matching the screen-shot on the right:

{“host”:”orditux.org”,”value”:”mnhfnBdqAncwClom”,”path”:”/”,”name”:”JBYCQSFBLPWFBFJM”}

To find how to manage your navigation cookies when using different sorts of web browsers, you can find more information at http://www.aboutcookies.org.