PF Tracking Cookies: Harmful or Helpful?

[Phrak]

Why is Physics Forum launching what Norton 360 identifies as "Virus and Spyware".

Several tests tell me these originate on this site.

Just curious.

 

[Evo]

They're just cookies that save some information so it doesn't have to be downloaded every time.

Norton 360 never finds the PF cookies, every time it runs it ONLY finds the TV guide tracking cookie and deletes it, causing me to have to re-select my location everytime. It's really stupid and annoying. Norton is really useless at this kind of thing.

 

[Phrak]

They're just cookies that save some information so it doesn't have to be downloaded every time.

Norton 360 never finds the PF cookies, every time it runs it ONLY finds the TV guide tracking cookie and deletes it, causing me to have to re-select my location everytime. It's really stupid and annoying. Norton is really useless at this kind of thing.

I don't know what TV guide is. I enter PF then run Norton 360 to start with a clean slate. After a while I run Norton again, and get a hit. Why is that?

 

[Kurdt]

I've moved this to feedback.

 

[Kronos5253]

Yeah that's just a basic cookie that the site uses...

My question is:

Why are you people using Norton?

Download AVG 9.0.. It's free and it's 100000000x better than norton, and most anti-virus programs out. My dad does IT service for banks and other companies in the area and he swears by it.

While you're at it get:
Ad-Aware
Spybot

 

[Kronos5253]

I don't know what TV guide is. I enter PF then run Norton 360 to start with a clean slate. After a while I run Norton again, and get a hit. Why is that?

Because everytime you visit a page on PF (or the internet in general), it downloads a "cookie" to your computer, which just saves the information for that page, making it easier and faster to access it again. That's why websites that you've visited before (that you haven't deleted the cookies for) come up quicker than pages that you've never been to.

 

[diazona]

Because everytime you visit a page on PF (or the internet in general), it downloads a "cookie" to your computer, which just saves the information for that page, making it easier and faster to access it again. That's why websites that you've visited before (that you haven't deleted the cookies for) come up quicker than pages that you've never been to.

Actually, how fast a web page loads doesn't have anything to do with cookies. (If anything, the quickest load time is achieved with no cookies at all) It depends mostly on caching, bandwidth, and server load.

The cookie simply allows a web server to correlate different visits by the same browser. E.g. when you log into PF, the server sends your browser a cookie with unique session ID, some string like D7YKKKK14UIDDV55514, and the server also records "user diazona is logged in with session ID D7YKKKK14UIDDV55514" in its own database. Then later on, when you access another page on PF, the browser sends that cookie (including the session ID) to the server, and the server can check the ID in its database to see that it corresponds to a logged-in user. That's how it can tell me apart from you or an anonymous guest.