What Are Cookies?

Cookies are pieces of information that a Web site transfers to your computer's hard disk for record-keeping purposes. Cookies can make the Web more useful by storing information about your preferences on a particular Web site, such as your user id for The Socionomics Institute.

How Do Cookies Work?

A cookie is simply a temporary area of storage that is on your computer. Normal software uses millions of bytes of temporary storage all the time. If you were able to shut it off, no non-Web-based program would be able to function properly because storage unique to each specific user is required for the rich interfaces that people have come to expect from software. Cookies allow Web sites to begin building complex functionality more akin to that of a normal program by providing this required temporary storage on a per-user basis. Without cookies, the features of the site and your ability to customize them would be greatly limited.

The use of cookies is an industry standard, and many major Web sites use them to provide useful features for their customers. Most browsers are initially set to accept cookies. If you'd prefer, you can set yours to refuse cookies. However, you may not be able to take full advantage of a Web site if you do so.

The following sections can be used as a guide to enabling cookies.

Internet Explorer 6
  1. Select Tools -> Internet Options... from the menu.
  2. Select the Privacy Tab.
  3. Click the Advanced Button.
  4. Make sure the box "Always allow Session cookies" is checked.

IE 4.0 and 5.0

  1. Select Tools -> Internet Options... from the menu.
  2. Select the Security Tab.
  3. Click the Custom Settings button.
  4. In the section labeled Cookies, make sure the following are selected:

Netscape 4.x

  1. Select Edit -> Preferences... from the menu.
  2. Click on the Advanced category.
  3. In the section labeled Cookies, make sure the following is selected:

Netscape 6.0

  1. Select Edit -> Preferences... from the menu.
  2. Click on the Advanced category.
  3. Click on the Cookies category.
  4. In the section labeled Cookies, make sure the following is selected: