Program: CookieCutter
CookieCutter
is a little program I wrote that
allows you to display, modify, and even delete
cookies. Since the banner-ad-tracking
firm DoubleClick probably keeps a lot of information on your browsing
habits, you want to befuddle them. After all, they are using a tiny
bit of storage on your hard disk to rack up per-click profits, giving
you nothing in return (directly, at least; obviously, ad sponsorship
keeps some web sites on the air). In Figure 18-10, I
am editing the cookie to, umm, “update” the personal
identity cookie to an invalid number (a lot of 9’s, and too
many digits). A few lines above that, you can see the
prefs.bgcolor
cookie that I set to
“green.”
Figure 18-10. The CookieCutter display
I won’t show the CookieCutter
source code
here as it doesn’t really relate to web techniques (it’s
a client-side application), but it’s included in the source
archive for the book. CookieCutter
also assumes
your cookies are stored in the Netscape format; for the Microsoft
Explorer format, you’ll have to change the file-reading and
file-writing code.
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