Drink Mouse Milk with your cookies, and you will be fine, just a little loser.
WTF is this?
- Thread starter Lil Foot
- Start date
If you guys hadn't run off Ol Flipster he'd tell you the bestest ways to maintain your IP security. And he wouldn't stop there, either.
It's pretty well covered by most here already, but to reiterate: cookies are small text files that a website leaves with your browser in order to track information like your login state and active sessions. SOME places use them for more reasons. I doubt OTT is one of those. If you want to maintain a logged in state, you will need to accept them. Incidentally, accepting cookies will most likely result in a cookie being set saying that you accept cookies 
The legal issue has been well addressed already. It's especially restricted in EU, so international sites have to do more to comply.
The legal issue has been well addressed already. It's especially restricted in EU, so international sites have to do more to comply.
To understand cookies, you need to know this: once you click the "login" button on this website, you are sending your username/password to the server. Then later on, when you click on a link, or post a message in thread, the website has no way to know that you are the same guy that logged-in a few seconds ago.
Think of it as if every action you do on the website would be a phone call. You first call to give your username/password, then they tell you: OK, yeah, we acknowledge you are who you say you are.
Then you call back to say "I wanna post something". They'd be like "who are you?"
So to make this work, after you call to login, they reply with "OK, yeah, we acknowledge you are who you say you are. Your reference number is abcd1234".
Then when you wanna post something, you say "Hey, my ref number is abcd1234, I wanna post something". They reply with "ok, we have that ref in our books, it shows that you are the guy that successfully logged in earlier, so we will allow you to post"
So every subsequent calls you make, you give them your reference number. That's the cookie. With this, they can look in their book and say "oh yeah, ref number abcd1234 was given to that guy who successfully logged in earlier. So we trust him since he's the only one who knows about that ref number".
You can see how this is absolutely needed to make the website work.
It becomes bad, when they start saving info about you. They can build a database that holds info like "user with ref number abcd1234 looks at posts involving B series tractors all the time. So we will display ads for attachments about B series when he visits the site." And it can get a lot more messy than this because they can sell your info to other companies. And when they send your "ref number" to google ads, it allows google to track you too.
Cookies are required. We need them. And companies can abuse of them. These new laws make no sense because they don't solve anything. They don't address the issue.
BTW, the option of disabling cookies has always been a setting you can configure in your browser (even in the browsers in the '90s). But disabling it always makes it impossible to login to your bank website, forum or anything else.
Think of it as if every action you do on the website would be a phone call. You first call to give your username/password, then they tell you: OK, yeah, we acknowledge you are who you say you are.
Then you call back to say "I wanna post something". They'd be like "who are you?"
So to make this work, after you call to login, they reply with "OK, yeah, we acknowledge you are who you say you are. Your reference number is abcd1234".
Then when you wanna post something, you say "Hey, my ref number is abcd1234, I wanna post something". They reply with "ok, we have that ref in our books, it shows that you are the guy that successfully logged in earlier, so we will allow you to post"
So every subsequent calls you make, you give them your reference number. That's the cookie. With this, they can look in their book and say "oh yeah, ref number abcd1234 was given to that guy who successfully logged in earlier. So we trust him since he's the only one who knows about that ref number".
You can see how this is absolutely needed to make the website work.
It becomes bad, when they start saving info about you. They can build a database that holds info like "user with ref number abcd1234 looks at posts involving B series tractors all the time. So we will display ads for attachments about B series when he visits the site." And it can get a lot more messy than this because they can sell your info to other companies. And when they send your "ref number" to google ads, it allows google to track you too.
Cookies are required. We need them. And companies can abuse of them. These new laws make no sense because they don't solve anything. They don't address the issue.
BTW, the option of disabling cookies has always been a setting you can configure in your browser (even in the browsers in the '90s). But disabling it always makes it impossible to login to your bank website, forum or anything else.
OrangeKrush
Well-known member
Equipment
BX2680, LA344 with Piranha tooth bar, LP PF 1242, LP Rear Blade, KK 60" BB
Thanks awesome.. that description was easily siphoned by this ol school brain. Makes sense now and I now know why when I’m online.. wherever I go, ads pop up that catch my attention.
Do I have to pay for the cookies in advance like I would if I wanted to buy an implement from some manufactures? Could I get vanilla wafers instead of cookies???
Would that make it an 2awesome explanation? (not to be confused with too awesome). Or awesome^2?Agreed, that was an awesome explanation!
I have no problem with someone using a cookie to remember who I am. I DO have a problem with them profiting from knowing that. I should get a 90% cut of every penny they make on that information, and be notified if my information ever leaves their server again without my permission. THAT should be the law. It would put a lot of leachy advertising out of business. None of it's free, and all of it costs me. If the crap was good enough, I'd find out by word of mouth and go get one. It's bandwidth I'd rather use for the speed of seeing what I want to see, instead of a ton of garbage I'm not interested in. If I want to go shopping, I'll use Bing or on occasion, Google. I quit using Google for searches because suddenly I start getting e-mail junk about something searched for on Google. And LOTS of it. Google makes gozillions of dollars selling information, which not only get us pestered by every left-handed Waffle turner salesman, but sets up so much of the real crimes of identity theft. If you do something on a frequent basis and someone is tracking it, it's a matter of time before they slip in between the cracks and BECOME you long enough to use your credit cards. ANY cookie used should come with an explanation of EXACTLY what data is being collected, and just as I am required to accept them, websites should be required to ask my permission to look at them on my machine again. Once on my machine, that's MY data. Websites and advertisers should have to pay me for storage otherwise, especially if they're including 3rd and 4th party cookies. Look at the number of cookies on your machine sometime, and calculate your income if you were getting $0.01/day for each cookie for storing it. Most of us could easily retire.