LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Cookies: Users
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The most important thing that cookies do is allow developers to maintain state across a series of transactions. When HTTP was first developed, it assumed transactions without connections to each other. Every document fetch was a separate action, with no record kept of the referring document. Server administrators could examine their logs to see who had visited, but firewalls, dynamic IP addresses, and the scanty information kept in those logs made it difficult to identify invidual users and the paths they had taken through a site. By placing a small "nametag" or other information on the client computer, it's easy to tell if a visitor has been to a site previously, and connect the identity of that visitor to other information kept on the server. Cookies allow site administrators to follow users as they travel through a site, and allow them to store a small amount of information on the client (like the classic shopping basket).
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Cookies make the interaction between users and web sites faster and easier. Without cookies, it would be very difficult for a web site to allow a visitor to fill up a shopping cart or to remember the user's preferences or registration details for a future visit.
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The introduction of cookies was not widely known to the public, at the time. In particular, cookies were accepted by default, and users were not notified of the presence of cookies. Some people were aware of the existence of cookies as early as the first quarter of 1995,[28] but the general public learned about them after the Financial Times published an article about them on February 12, 1996. In the same year, cookies received lot of media attention, especially because of potential privacy implications. Cookies were discussed in two U.S. Federal Trade Commission hearings in 1996 and 1997.
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Cookies are a very important method for maintaining state on the Web. "State" in this case refers to an application's ability to work interactively with a user, remembering all data since the application started, and differentiating between users and their individual data sets.
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Many modern browsers, such as Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer and Opera block third party cookies if requested by the user. Internet Explorer version 6 allows a mild form of blocking, called leashing. A leashed cookie is a third-party cookie that is sent by the browser only when accessing a third-party document via the same first-party. For example, if third.com sets a cookie when an image is requested, and this cookie is set for the first time when the user views a document from first.com, the same cookie is not sent if the user downloads a document that contains the same image but the document is on another site other.com, if the cookie is leashed. A leashed cookie is different from a blocked cookie in that it is sent, in this example, if the image is contained in another document from the same site first.com.[31]
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In addition, cookies are facing their greatest changes since their early appearances in Netscape 1.1 and 2.0. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is nearing approval of the controversial RFC 2109, which includes both a specification for the contents of cookies (endorsing and extending the existing Netscape standard) and a rules covering the ways servers and browsers should handle cookies. At the same time, Netscape, Firefly, and VeriSign (with the support of Microsoft, Sun, IBM, HP, and a horde of other computer, financial, and media companies) have proposed the Open Profiling Standard to address many of the privacy and identification issues raised by cookies. Rather than require web sites to ask for information repetitively, OPS starts by having users enter personal information, then releases it (with consent) when requested. While not strictly a cookie, OPS has similar implications and performs many of the same tasks in a more secure way.
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