Cookies/ security issues

You're asking a pretty complicated question, and you're not giving us quite enough info. But I'll try to help.

First, DO NOT turn down all Security and Privacy settings in your browser. For example, there are security settings for the "Internet" and "Local Intranet" zones. On your "local Intranet" (your home/office computer network), you might want to let other computers browse your hard disk and share files... and that's OK. But it's definitely NOT OK for computers to do that over the Internet. For your safety, please set your "Internet Zone" security back to "Medium."

But that doesn't fix your original problem. So here are three things to try:

1) Download these two programs: Spybot Search & Destroy and Ad-Aware  You should download and run both. These two programs will look for spyware, which includes tracking cookies.

2) Delete ALL of your cookies. That's kind of a pain, because every website that remembered your passwords and prefs will be forgotton. But it's very possible that you have a corrupted cookie - maybe the cookie isn't corrupt, but the way the website is working with the cookie has a bug. This has happened to me before. Maybe a simpler thing is to delete the cookies from the websites that you're having problems with -- just be sure to delete ALL of the cookies from that website, since there can be several.

3) If problems persist, upgrade to MSIE 6. It could be that the website you're using hasn't been tested with IE 5.

Also, don't think of cookies as being necessarily bad.  All a cookie does is help the site remember who you are when you move from one browser window to another. For instance, if you move from Dell's main site to the store to downloads to the forum, you are moving across multiple servers. The cookie helps make sure that your session stays consistent and you don't have to re-identify yourself.

99.9999% of all cookies are harmless, spyware is the real culprit to watch for.  As said earlier, Ad-aware can help root it out.

I am afraid that all of the upcoming proposed legislation against spyware is going to mistakenly add cookies to the list and then the web will be rendered useless.

Cookies are good, it's bad web sites that are bad, stay away from them.  If you fear cookies, just delete them periodically, don't turn them off, you'll make more trouble for yourself.

Hard disks aren't bad, either. But they can get corrupted.

Many times, I've had sites that fail to remember me -- Dell's, for example. I'd have to enter my user name and p/w every time. By deleting the site's cookie and re-entering my info, the problem was solved, and I could go back and get my customer info and use the chat boards.

Web servers aren't infallible.

Ad-Aware and Spybot can find very malicious software on your computer. It's very important to run those tools. Although they detect "tracking cookies," their real value is in finding bad software - "malware".

I'm not worried about tracking cookies, but I have no problem deleting them.

Message Edited by Marshall_600m on 04-27-2004 01:26 PM

typo: browser is MSIE6 on Win XP, Spybot SD, Adaware, all other soft is standard 5100.

I've narrowed the problem down to ISP. The less expensive one doesn't let me get e-mail, post on forums, etc. I probably blocked some alert from it and i don't know how to unblock it. I'm pretty sure is has something to do with the firewall.

Also: this non-functional agressive ISP changed the window title to "MS Internet Explorer von freenet.de"? Can that be fixed?

thanks

Message Edited by Marshall_600m on 04-28-2004 09:57 AM

Message Edited by Marshall_600m on 04-28-2004 09:57 AM

You can change the name of the browser that appears in the IE title bar by using RegEdit.

    HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\Window Title

If you delete the key, it will revert to the default.

Or, you can download X-Setup from www.xteq.com. This will let you change the title bar and also the animated icon in the title bar