Internet Security

With the internet moving forward with stunning popularity and increased usage, it is but natural that issues like internet security and privacy gain significance. However Internet Privacy concerns really caught fire because a few perverted minds deemed it appropriate to prise strictly private information out of other peoples’ computers and websites and use it to their advantage. More over the rising breed of internet hackers, phishers and spammers have spawned a totally new species of internet citizens who create malicious programmes and infiltrate these programmes or ‘Viruses” to disable the functions of the machines of the internet users. The increasing number of viruses, Trojans and worms have dented deeply the confidence of the netizens and have made them overly privacy and security conscious. Disabling viruses, Denial of Service attacks and phishing for totally private information like Credit Card Details , Bank Account details etc have made the web browsers look for strong firewalls, anti-virus programmes and spyware/adware blockers.The topmost villain in the minds of the netizens, as far as internet privacy concerns go, are the little pieces of data that are became famous for all the wrong reasons, the Cookies. A cookie is a piece of text that a Web server can store on a user's hard disk. Cookies allow a Web site to store information on a user's machine and later retrieve it. The pieces of information are stored as name-value pairs or simply named pieces of data. For example, a Web site might generate a unique ID number for each visitor and store the ID number on each user's machine using a cookie file. If an user types the URL of a Web site into his browser, his browser sends a request to the Web site for the page. When the browser does this, it will search the machine for a cookie file that the website has set. If it finds a cookie file related to this particular website, the browser will send all of the name-value pairs in the file to this particular website’s server along with the URL. If it finds no cookie file, it will send no cookie data. If no name-value pairs are received, the website knows that the client have not visited before. The server creates a new ID for the visitor in the website’s database and then sends name-value pairs to user’s machine in the header for the Web page it sends. The user’s machine stores the name-value pairs in its hard disk. There are other pieces of information that the server can send with the name-value pair. One of these is an expiration date. Another is a path so that the site can associate different cookie values with different parts of the site. But importantly the user has control over this process. The user can set an option in the browser so that the browser informs the user every time a site sends name-value pairs to the machine. The user is free to accept or deny the values. Cookies evolved because they solve a big problem for the people who implement Web sites. In the broadest sense, a cookie allows a site to store state information on client machine. This information lets a Web site remember what state the browser is in. An ID is one simple piece of state information -- if an ID exists on the user machine, the site knows that the client has visited before. The state is, the client browser has visited the site at least one time and the site knows the client ID from that visit. Sites can store user preferences so that the site can look different for each visitor. Most sites seem to store preferences like this in the site's database and store nothing but an ID as a cookie, but storing the actual values in name-value pairs is another way to do it .E-commerce sites can implement things like shopping carts and quick checkout options. The cookie contains an ID and lets the site keep track of the user as he adds different things to his shopping cart. Each item added to the shopping cart is stored in the site's database along with the client’s ID value. When the user checks out, the site knows what is in his cart by retrieving all of his selections from the database. It would be impossible to implement a convenient shopping mechanism without cookies or something like them. The database is able to store is things that the user has selected from the site, pages the user has viewed from the site, information he has given to the site in online forms, etc. All of the information is stored in the site's database, and in most cases, a cookie containing his unique ID is all that is stored on the user’s computer. Cookies certainly make a lot of things possible that would be impossible otherwise.

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