What are "cookies"?
Cookies - what are cookies? Why do websites need cookies? Cookies are little pieces of information; when you go to a website for the first time, that website will place cookies in your computer's mouth and say, "Here, have this. This is good for you." Cookies are generally, mostly, a really good thing. They exist because in the early days of the Internet, when everybody was surfing on dialup connections, you would load up your CompuServe page for the first time and there were a lot of framing devices and graphics and things that would be pretty constant to the architecture of that webpage. In order for your browsing experience, or surfing experience on that webpage to be fast and effective, CompuServe would give your computer some cookies that would sit there on your computer's cookie shelf. The next time you go back to CompuServe, those CompuServe cookies are already sitting on your computer's cookie shelf, making that browsing experience faster and quicker. Of course, now we have a lot of broadband speeds, and it's in fact possible to get on that page and download fresh content very quickly. Now, what different web advertisers figured out is that they could sometimes put cookies on your computer that you might not want, and cookies could end up on your cookie shelf that weren't necessarily good cookies for your computer to have. That's why it's good to clean out your cookies occasionally. Cookies also store the kinds of things that allow you to go back to certain sites and not have to put in your login name and password over and over again.
