n3wjack's blog

Photo by visualpanic, cc-licensed

You probably know about browser cookies. Those little text files stored on your hard drive your browser allows web sites to use for storing something, anything in. Those are used to remember who you are basically, so you don’t have to keep telling the server that and go from one login form to another.

As with all things, cookies can also be used by evildoers, like ad agencies who want to keep track of your surfing behaviour. As all the ads come from a single server, they can plant a cookie containing an unique ID on your machine, and so they figure out what sites you are visiting if they log all that data. Which they probably do.

I posted before about how you can automatically clear those kind of evil cookies using Firefox, but there is a kind of cookie that does not get cleared like that unfortunately. It’s the Flash cookie! Now what is that? Well it’s the same really, only this time every Flash applet loaded from a given site can store a piece of text on your machine… etc. Problem is how do you clear the damn things?

Well, Adobe has a page up where you can do just that. That folder thingy you see on top is not an image btw, it’s the actually application to clear all those cookies with. No harm in cleaning the slate now and then I guess. It can also be handy if you want to cheat at some online game sometimes, and they store something in the Flash cookie to keep state, or to stop you from playing again.

We don’t like that. So we eat ur cookies.

Related posts:

1. how to change flash player privacy and security settings
2. the right way to block evil website cookies
3. blocking flash ads in firefox
4. cookie monster
5. astra trillian is making geeks drool