Remember Netscape Navigator? Some of you might have called it Nutscrape Irritator. Ha Ha. It’s funny because it’s true.
Well back in the day, Netscape was the shizzle. All of a sudden this stupid gopher thing was filled with images and colors. We were all happily browsing in a 3D colorful world when the lamestream media “discovered” Netscape. They poked around and saw the names of sites they had visited. The names were associated with weird strings they didn’t understand.
“Hmmm, what’s this?” an intrepid cub reporter asked?
“Oh, those? They’re called cookies.”
“How did they get here?”
Now Your JoeDog doesn’t know the how that question was answered back in 1995 but fsck that guy. Since the moment some wanna-be tech writer discovered cookies, we’ve been dealing with cookie hysteria. Someone is writing things to our hard drive! Yeah, you know who’s doing that? You are.
Here’s the problem: Hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) is stateless. You send a request to a server and it sends something back. The server doesn’t hear from you until you make another request. There’s nothing in each ensuing request to positively identify you as the person who made that last request. To get around this problem, Netscape invented the magic cookie.
How does it work? We’ll nerdsplain after the jump….
Continue reading No, A Website Doesn’t Write Cookies To Your Hard Drive