Did you know that Netscape and MIE create a file that helps web servers keep track of you?
On Macs it is in a file called Magic Cookie, on IBM type CPUs it is in a file called cookies.txt
It isn't really meant to be understood: some of the data is encrypted so it's a little hard to read.

This "MagicCookie" file is very useful in some cases, like storing some viewing configurations (i.e. with or without frames, etc...), but it can also help the server know WHO you are and what you do.

Cookies are informations stored by you when you visit a site, designed and useful FOR THE SITE you visited

A Cookie is a little nugget of information that is sent to your browser from a World Wide Web Server. This block of data can be anything, a unique user ID generated by the server, the current date and time, the IP Address of where the browser is logged onto the net or any other chunk of data that you want.

After a browser receives a cookie it will then send that cookie (nugget of info) to the server that set it whenever it requests an html page. The browser will only send the cookie to the server that originally set it. This means that I (at my server)can't tell if you (some browser) have cookies that other sites have set. In other words I can't steal cookies I haven't given you by using HTTP protocols.

Cookies can be set either in the HTTP Header or in the Head portion of the HTML document using a META tag. (more about meta-tags on Fravias Page Of Reverse Engineering)

The cookies.txt file
If you lock the cookies.txt file (c:\NAVIGA~1\cookies.txt on non-Mac machines) this will not stop cookies from working. Cookies will still reside in memory. It will however make it so the cookies can't be written to the hard drive, it may also cause Netscape to lock when you quit.

The best way to eliminate once for all all cookies is to create a directory cookies.txt inside Netscape's directory (where the file cookies.txt originally is). This directory will get a GREATER priority than the file, and all cookies will be therefore sent to dev null. Once you have created the new cookies.txt directory you may quietly reset "Options"/ "Network preferences"/"protocols"/"show an alert before accepting a cookie" to NO, the sites you visit will "believe" that they planted cookies in your hardisk and you will know that no cookie whatsoever has been planted.

The same trick also works on the Opera browser. Simply make a directory called cookies.dat inside Opera´s directory, and delete the file with the same name.

The information about cookies on this page is largely from two documents written by Fravia about anonymity on the net and from a rather technical text about cookies. But in my opinion it´s important for anyone on the Web to be aware about cookies and what information about the netsurfer they´ll give the sender access to. So I compiled those two text into one to make the information available on one more place.