TCS - CookieCop 2

CookieCop 2

by Tim R. Wolf
Idaho PC Users Group
From the May 2003 issue of the I/O Port Newsletter

Time for an Experiment. I logged onto the Internet and spent exactly 15 minutes browsing as would on any normal day. In that time, I checked CNN's home page, glanced at the headlines and read three articles. Next I jumped to Hotmail and checked my mail (no messages) and then ended up on MSN's home page where I read another article. Finally, I jumped to the editorial cartoon pages but before that page could fully load, my 15 minutes was up and I closed my browser.

During this short, but leisurely time, my browser connected to an amazing 218 different sites. Whoa! I thought I only connected to 4.... A total of 268 cookies tried to deposit themselves on my PC (mostly from banner-ad sites) and 189 of those could look at information about the last pages that I had visited, had I allowed them. I noticed that my browser had sent 78 cookies back to sites, many of which surprised me.

Where did I learn all this? Check out PC Magazine's free utility, CookieCop 2, by Mark Sweeney (PCMag.com). This program blocks (or allows) any cookies that you desire, and it can block a lot of those annoying pop-up and pop-under advertisements. I've been using version 1 of this program for years. Version 2 has been nicely improved.

You should care about cookies because they can track which sites you've been to and what you did on those sites. Cookies can contain any kind of information that the vendors want to store in them and the drop them indiscriminately, by the thousands, on your hard drive. They do have their uses. Say that you log onto a vendor's site and you purchase something with a credit card. Less sophisticated vendors may choose to store this information in a cookie so the next time you visit their site, they will already know who you are. Typically this information is encrypted within the cookie, but still, you might wonder who knows how to decrypt it. But they most often store information about where you browsed and what you searched for the last time you were on their site so they can track your habits.

Although most sites would prefer to drop cookies, they survive just fine if they can't. However, some sites, such as Amazon and Hotmail won't run without cookies enabled. What they store in their own cookies is anybody's guess, but if you want to use these sites, you must turn on cookies.

Here-in lies the problem. With both Netscape and IE, you can Enable or Disable all cookies. This is a black-and-white choice and in real-life use, you have to enable them. But with CookieCop, you can choose who can use cookies and who can't. For example, I allow Amazon and Hotmail, but disable cookies from most other sites. I'll explain the details below. In any case, it gives me the best of both worlds. I get more privacy and I can decide who I think is a reputable site and who isn't.

This does make my surfing a bit more complicated. Occasionally, I'll get to a page that requires some information about me, usually a name, password, and a short survey of some type. If you fill this information out, but you can't get past the "login" page, that is a sure indication that you need to enable the cookie for them. Nicer pages will announce that "Cookies must be enabled" but most do not because they assume that most web-surfers are clueless about cookies. At this point, you get to decide if the site is worthy of your time and information. In other words, you can enable the cookie and give them what they want (and you can rest-assured they'll never forget it), or you can bail.

In practice though, 99% of the sites you'll visit will try to deposit cookies (if you allow them or not) and they'll just continue on their merry way. In my experiment above, 268 sites tried to leave cookies, but failed, yet life continued on. On some nights, when I have a lot of research or reading to do, I'll find a thousand cookies that failed, and none of the sites cared. The problem described above only happens infrequently and only if the site wants something from you. So, why not squash as many of them as you can?

Using Cookiecop

Setup is fairly easy but you need to do work in several places. Here are the steps. Download the utility from PCMag.com. On their site, you first must register with their site and then you can download the relatively small utility. It installs in seconds. When launched, you'll see a stop-light icon in your system tray. Double-click it to open the program.

CookieCop acts as a Proxy server for your PC. From the main configuration screen, you'll want to set these settings: Name the service "CookieCop" and assign it port 8100 (a recommended default). You should probably also set it to launch with Windows, especially if you use Netscape or some other non-Microsoft browser.

Next, you need to go into your browser and change your Proxy settings. In Netscape, go to Edit, Preferences, Advanced, Proxies. Set the "FTP Proxy" to "cookiecop" with a port 8100. Do the same for the HTTP and the SSL proxies.

In IE, select Tools, Internet Options, Connections tab, select LAN settings. Mark "Use a Proxy Server", "Cookiecop" and port 8100. Select the Advanced button. Make similar entries as above.

Now jump back into CookieCop and select the "Cookie List" tab. Mark "Reject the cookie if the site is not on the list" radio button.

Next ADD all the sites that you can think of which need cookies. Here are the obvious ones that I've found:
*.Amazon.com
*.PCMag.com
*.Support.Microsoft.com
*.askjeeves.com
*.yourbankingsite.com
(these are recommended).

Notice that Google does not need a cookie. If you use other webmail clients, such as Netscape, or Yahoo, you may or may not need to enable cookies for them; I'll leave them for you to fiddle with. However, I do know about Hotmail. They were pretty nasty because they use a lot of different servers. My entries for the ADD button were:

*.Law11.hotmail.msn.com
*.Law5.hotmail.msn.com
*.Law4.hotmail.msn.com

How do I figure these out? Simple. If the site doesn't work, I look at the URL and add it to CookieCop. Notice the asterisk-dot in the front of the name.

After you surf for a while, look in CookieCop's event log. You'll see all of the banner-ad companies trying like the devil to drop cookies. Sites such as Doubleclick.com, adfarm, adhost and others will be obvious. These are all clearly marked with big red X's. It warms my heart to see them stacked up like that. Because of CookieCop, you will be able to browse the web more-or-less anonymously.

Microsoft must have realized that a lot of people were using programs like this and many who used Hotmail simply allowed all *.MSN.com traffic to deposit cookies - making Hotmail work without all of the entries I had to code above. Surprise, surprise when I noticed a new ad site with the name of ads.msn.com. Easily blocked with no ill-effects.

Other Features

Now CookieCop has a few other interesting features which I've not fully explored. Are you annoyed when those pop-up or pop-under advertisements cover up your work? See the Navigation Tab, where you can block all of them with a click of a button. (Unfortunately, this doesn't work with all pop-ups because they can code around them with JAVA, but I've noticed it has caught several of them.)

You should also check the "Remove Referrers" box. This keeps a link from one page to the next from transmitting the prior page's location, which can be read by the target page. CookieCop replaces this information with blanks just before the jump. Turning this off does not affect your browser's Forward or Back Buttons.

Final Notes

As you can see, once you enable CookieCop, you have some maintenance to be concerned with. After a few weeks of browsing, everything should settle down and you'll find that you don't have to mess with it very often. But, during the transition period it can get frustrating when a site which used to work doesn't any more. Don't forget to enable the cookies if you are having problems with a page. One of the neater features with this new release is you can make the cookies transient: Once you leave the session, CookieCop cleans up all the cookie crumbs. In other words, even if a site requires cookies, you can automatically delete them when you leave.

Lastly, since CookieCop is your new Proxy server, if you turn it off, then you're web browser will quit working. To fix, simply re-launch CookieCop. If you ever want to de-install CookieCop, don't forget to turn off the proxy settings in your browser.

But, if you are like me, (don't you all aspire to be a geek?) you'll never want to turn it off. I've been running my copy for years and I highly recommend it. Comments are welcome. Traywolf@hotmail.com.



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Tulsa Computer Society 5/02/2003
Don Singleton, President