Home
Up

Cookies are small text files, held in a special location, that can be written or read by small programs (called scripts) that are included in web pages that you view.  Cookies are actually a security measure, designed to allow these scripts to store information between one visit to a site and the next, without having to allow the scripts to read or write the rest of your hard disk.

There are two types of cookie - temporary and persistent.

• Temporary cookies are always deleted whenever you exit from your browser - they are used to store very short term information, such as security information so that you do not have to individually log in to every secure page you visit on a given site.

• Persistent cookies are stored on your hard disk when you exit from your browser.

Cookies represent no security risk to your computer, personal information, or the information or files held on your computer.  Any information that a script can write to a cookie could just as easily be sent directly to the server.

Information held in cookies for one site cannot be read by another site.

• A specific weakness reported early in 2000 was that it was possible to artificially construct a cookie with a malformed site name that could be read on certain other sites.  It formed a mechanism by which multiple sites could deliberately illegally share a set of cookies.  It did not imply any general weakness in the cookie security mechanisms, and did not allow them to read or write the rest of the cookies on client systems.

• We are aware of no mechanism by which any other site can read or write to the cookies we place on your system.

Cookies DO make it easier for certain site owners (shopping sites for example) to track your browsing patterns on their site from one visit to the next.  You may consider this an invasion of privacy.  However, please remember that it only simplifies the tracking - they can track you whether you have cookies installed or not.

Cookies are very small (a cookie cannot use more than 4KB of disk space), and your browser has built-in limits on how many cookies it will allow before deleting the old ones and re-using the disk space.  Cookies cannot go wild and eat up your disk space!

This site uses cookies in two ways:

• We use Temporary cookies as part of our security system, in order to allow you to browse between pages on the Subscribers' site without having to log in to each page individually.  We do not hold ANY personal or financial information in these cookies.
• We use Persistent cookies to allow you to store how far you have managed on a puzzle, and go back and continue later from where you left off.  Again, we hold NO personal or financial information in these cookies.

[ Back ] [ Up ] [ Next ]