<sigh>
I know exactly how board forums work.
I know exactly how cookies & sandboxes work on various platforms and applications.
I've seen simple easy to follow architectures, and I've seen horrendously designed applications that take an army to maintain that are still in use today.
I frequently kill my cookies off for good reasons. Some I keep around because it's a PITA to restore the "defaults".
But you can live without cookies; they are not required. They just make life a bit more convenient.
The best use of cookies will use the least amount of data: A color or font size preference, your last page URL,
login preferences. All very mild mannered and well-behaved.
ES is well-behaved. :wink:
Some sites though glom on to everything:
- Amazon does a very good job at collecting your shopping preferences and tastefully creates suggestions. They get my highest approval.
- LinkedIn also does a pretty good job of looking through your connections data to find possible past associations. So far they are not polluted with weighty advertisement.
- On the flip-side, NBCNEWS (formerly MSNBC) is terrible and they bombard you with all sorts of ugly garish advertising.
- The Motorcycle-Superstore has tentacles far and wide, so they're behavior-based advertising will show up everywhere. That's a cookie I don't miss.
Other sites are far worse - but then I don't go there.
Once upon a time cookies were limited in length to 255 characters. Then it was extended to 1023, and 4095. When they couldn't get enough length, a website would register another domain and pull it in through an iframe or external media reference, and doubling or ... whatever the storage they needed to support their intrusive profiling.
Today though cookies are considered very old tech. A better method which began to emerge during the first decade of the new millennium was "The Sandbox": Like the cookie, the Sandbox is involute and protected space - though many hackers try to break out of this through various means and tricks. Let me explain:
Cookies are text-based ASCII. They live in their own special directory co-resident with other temporary Internet media, scripts and resources.
The Sandbox also has a special place. It was first utilized by Java and then followed by Silverlight; I believe both were initially 1 mb in size. This is a huge space to store personal data - but it can only be accessed by the specific application. Sometimes we store media there or data, such as a spreadsheet or selection set (and maybe in multiples). Sandboxes are useful in that they make the web application (or
weblication if you will) load faster. However there's a problem with scenario if we want to work off-line. Enter the downloadable application:
With Silverlight, I can create applications that can work off-line much like a WPF Windows Desktop Application. And in fact - that's where the downloaded Silverlight applications live - on the Desktop. When you make this choice - your Sandbox grows to 10 mb for personal storage. Imagine I'm in Sales and I need to pull down my data from the home base before I catch my overseas flight: The data resides in my large sandbox and I can easily work with it in a disconnected state during the flight, and then sync back with the home base once I've landed. This is the pinnacle of a rich feature-filled web-based client experience! And I've been proud to architect many of these.
But the Sandbox, like the Cookies - are temporary, and can be manually deleted at any time by the User. They cannot be deleted or manipulated programmatically by external applications.
The Trick that nasty apps play is to hook the user into make a choice and allowing particular scripts to execute, to have access to the Operating System. That can only be achieved through human interaction.
Ever see popups that say "Click here to see more!" ??
Or "Let us clean your system!"
"FREE Software!"
Man if it's free, that's the first signal to back away.
So like clockwork, I regularly purge my cookies. I rarely use my real email address, instead opting for aliases. I also use a little known published featured called "The Hosts file" which allows me to block particular domains, extensions, and IP addresses of specific advertisers and spammers. This is the first key to fighting unwanted popups, ugly advertisement, and viruses.
It's like the old habit: If you own a car, it's cheapest to maintain it yourself. Better if you can repair it. Same with computers: Know how to maintain your system, better if you can fix it. At least - that's the way I operate.
Life is just a puzzle waiting to be figured out. 8)
Play safe, Be proactive.
KF
