[X4U] Scary widget

[DZ-Jay]

There is nothing special about "cookies", they are just plain text files 
stored within your filesystem, and so they are available to any other 
application.  They are not, however, available to other websites while 
using the browser -- as the browser will only serve to a website the 
cookies that are "owned" by that web site.  It is conceivable that a 
third party application can access your cookies and submit them to some 
server in the Internet, just as any other file in your computer could be 
harvested in the same way.  This is the realm of spyware applications, 
which can only perform their functions when locally executed on a 
computer by an authorized user (except in Windows computers, where they 
seem to be allowed to be installed and executed automatically by some 
browsers).  For this reason, you should be careful when installing new 
software (specially widgets), and make sure you trust the source.  Also 
be careful to check what the websites you visit are storing in cookies. 
  Some really braindead sites store important personal information, 
along with passwords, completely unencrypted.

	dZ.

Michael Winter wrote:
> 
> On Jun 9, 2005, at 5:50 PM, Muckerheide wrote:
> 
>> I figured it looked for a Netflix cookie that was able to access  our 
>> account data at Netflix.
> 
> 
> But that's worrisome too. That means that when you browsed something  
> like Amazon.com, they could conceivably access your Netflix data and  
> try to sell you what you've been waiting for. I would hope this data  
> wasn't be stored in a cookie accessible to any app running.
> 
> -Mike
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