Re: us

["N. Sivin" nsivin@xxxxxxxx]

Rafe magnanimously recommended Amy Virshup's article on
XyWrite and this list even though she misspelled his name;
he was right to do so.

Reading her article in Salon, an e-mag, put me in mind of a
small but
potent point. If you are using a Windows browser, unless you
have set your browser to let you know, you may not be aware
that there is a price for reading it. Every time you move
from one screeen to the next, Salon records a cookie on your
hard disk that it can read every time you log on. That way
it can track your choices which, according to ad gospel,
correspond to your "preferences," in which its advertisers
are very interested. In this respect it is typical of WWW
commercial sites.

You can always set your browser to repel cookies. E.g., in
Netscape 4, in the Edit|Preferences|Advanced menu, you can
set "Disable Cookies." For old browsers that don't offer
that option, you can just manually set the COOKIES.TXT file
to read-only.

That works fine with Salon, but it means you can't enter
some sites. For instance, if you read the New York Times,
you have to subscribe, and the site will not admit you
unless you allow it to set 2 cookies each time you log on.
In that case, you can set the browser to accept cookies, but
also set the "Warn me before accepting a cookie" option,
which lets you accept or reject it. That lets you see what
is going on. If you are forced to accept a cookie to do
something you want to do (e.g., buy a book), you will know
that it has happened. Afterward, you can always open
COOKIES.TXT in XyWrite and edit out the offending lines. The
file carries a warning that it shouldn't be edited, but as
long as you leave the header intact it doesn't do any harm.
If there are no lines you want to save (e.g., if you don't
subscribe to anything), you can keep this nuisance down by
setting your startup batch file to delete COOKIES.TXT every
time you reboot.

Cheers,
--
Nathan Sivin
History and Sociology of Science
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia PA 19104-6304
(215) 898-7454
nsivin@xxxxxxxx