The cookie is a text file saved in your browser's directory or folder and stored in RAM while your browser is running. Most of the information in a cookie is pretty mundane stuff, but some Web sites use cookies to store personal preferences. (MSN, and Netscape all have personalization processes that use cookies to store information). If you want to see what information is stored in your cookie file, use a text editor or a word processor to open a file called cookies.txt or MagicCookie in your browser's folder or directory.

When you need to pass some snippet of information to another system to make it do something, how do you do it? If you're on the Web or some other network, you use a cookie (also known as a magic cookie). Kerndata.com uses cookies to identify registered as well as unregistered users. It is sometimes necessary to use cookies in order to maintain position in the database. If you choose not to accept cookies, Kerndata.com will not function properly on your system.

No files are destroyed or compromised by cookies, but if you are concerned about being identified or about having your web browsing traced through the use of a cookie, set your browser to not accept cookies or use one of the new cookie blocking packages. Blocking all cookies prevents some online services, including Kerndata.com, from working. Also, preventing your browser from accepting cookies does not make you an anonymous user, it just makes it more difficult to track your usage.

What Are The Chances of Catching a Virus From a Cookie? A normal text based cookie cannot be of any danger to your computer or spread any viruses. Whether or not other cookies can be dangerous or spread viruses has to do with whether or not a file is "executable," meaning if it's a program rather than data. UNIX files, for instance, have some combination of the properties "readable," "writeable" and "executable." The executable property is necessary to enable a program in a file to do something. If a cookie is not stored in an executable format for that platform, it cannot do something hostile. Most cookies are not executable, and we have not come across one. In general Cookies are stored as text files and cannot be of danger or pass on viruses. Even if a cookie is executable it cannot automatically spread on a virus unless you execute it. But of course with recent bugs in Internet Explorer 3.0, it will let a site run a application. In theory, if a executable cookie was set with malicious contents, then it is possible that IE3.0 could execute it, then it could affect your computer with a virus.

Basically cookies cannot harm your computer. The general controversy is not what cookies can do to your computer, but what information they can store, and what they can pass on to servers, there is currently a new proposal to limit the features of the cookie protocol, which would give people a greater control over what cookies they can accept and from where.