Exposición de resultados 1.1 Medios materiales

4.3.2 Export, Import, or Back Up Your Cookies

Although some cookies can be intrusive, some can also be helpful as well. They can log you into web sites automatically and customize the way you use and view the site. So, when you buy a new PC, you might want to export cookies from an older computer to it. If you have more than one PC, you might want all of them to have the same cookies. And you might want to back up your cookies for safe-keeping in case you accidentally delete the wrong ones.

To export or back up cookies from IE, choose File Import and Export. The Import/Export Wizard will launch. Choose Export Cookies and follow the directions. A single text file containing all your cookies will be created in My Documents, though you can choose a different location for them. To import cookies, launch the Import/Export Wizard, choose Import Cookies, and browse to the location where the cookie file has been stored.

4.3.3 Examine and Delete Cookies Manually

You can't examine and delete your cookies from within Internet Explorer. However, because XP stores each IE cookie as an individual text file, you can read them and delete them just as you would any other text file. Go to C:\Documents and Settings\Your Name\Cookies in Windows Explorer, and you'll see a list of individual cookies in a format like this:

your [email protected][1].txt

As a general rule, the name of the web site or ad network will be after the @, but not always—sometimes it will merely be a number. Open the file as you would any other text file (in Notepad, WordPad, or another text editor). Usually, there will be a list of numbers and letters inside, though you might find other useful information in there—for example, your username and password for the web site. If you don't want the cookie on your hard disk, simply delete it as you would any other text file.

Netscape Navigator and Mozilla handle cookies differently than Internet Explorer. They store all cookies in a single file, cookies.txt, typically found in C:\Documents and Settings\<Your Name>\[Application Data\]Mozilla\Profiles\default\********.slt, where ******** is a random collection of numbers and letters. So, the directory might be C:\Documents and

Settings\Name\Mozilla\Profiles\default\46yhu2ir.slt. If you've set up different Netscape/Mozilla profiles (Tools Switch Profile Manage Profiles Create Profile), cookies.txt won't be in the default subfolder, but under each profile's name. You can open the file and see each individual cookie. You can't however, delete individual entries from the file by editing this file. Instead, use

Netscape's built-in Cookie Manager (at Tools Cookie Manager Manage Stored Cookies) to read and delete cookies.

4.3.4 Get a Third-Party Cookie Manager

The tools built into XP for managing cookies are reasonable, but for the most flexibility in handling cookies you should get a third-party cookie manager. My favorite (and my editor's favorite) is Cookie Pal, available at http://www.kburra.com. It lets you easily customize which sites you'll allow to put cookies on your PC, and it includes a cookie manager that lets you read and delete cookies. It also lets you accept or reject cookies on a case-by-case basis as you browse the Web. If you use browsers other than IE, you might be out of luck, though. As of this writing, Cookie Pal works only with Versions 3 and 4 of Netscape Navigator and Versions 4, 5, and 6 of Opera. (Mozilla and later Netscape version have similarly good managers built in, as mentioned earlier.)

Online ad networks have the potential to create in-depth, privacy-invading profiles of your web travels and personal interests, because they can place a single cookie on your hard disk that will track you across multiple sites. Normally, sites can't share cookie information with each other, but ad networks have found a way around this, so they can aggregate your behavior from many web sites.

You can fight back by opting out of some of the biggest online ad networks. You'll have them place an opt-out cookie on your hard disk that will tell the various sites not to track what you're doing; this will go a long way toward protecting your privacy.

To opt out of the DoubleClick online advertising network, go to http://www.doubleclick.com/us/corporate/privacy/privacy/ad-cookie/ and click on the "Ad Cookie Opt-Out" button at the bottom of the page.

To see whether the opt-out worked, if you're an Internet Explorer user, go to your cookies folder, which is typically C:\Documents and Settings\<Your Name>\Cookies. Look for a cookie named your name@doubleclick[1].txt—for example, preston gralla@doubleclick[1].txt. The contents of the cookie should look something like this:

id OPT_OUT doubleclick.net/ 1024 468938752 31583413 3447013104 29418226 *

In Netscape Navigator, your cookies.txt file is typically found in C:\Documents and Settings\<Your Name>\Application Data\Mozilla\Profiles\default\********.slt, where ******** is a random collection of numbers and letters. So, the directory might be C:\Documents and Settings\Name\Mozilla\Profiles\default\46yhu2ir.slt. Look in the file for an entry that looks like this: .doubleclick.net TRUE / FALSE 1920499138 id OPT_OUT

You can instead use Netscape's built-in Cookie Manager to examine the cookie, by choosing Tools Cookie Manager Manage Stored Cookies.

Some other advertising networks let you opt out as well. For details, go to http://www.networkadvertising.org/optout_nonppii.asp and follow the instructions for opting out. To verify that you've successfully opted out of the other ad networks, click on the Verify Cookies menu item on the left part of the page.

4.3.6 See Also

[Hack #33]

[Hack #63]

[ Team LiB ]

Hack 35 Read Web Pages Offline

Take the Web with you wherever you go, and put it into an easily searchable database on your PC .

One of the main problems with doing research on the Web is that there's no easy way to save all the information you find and no simple way to read web pages when you're offline. Internet Explorer includes some basic tools for saving web pages and reading through them when you're not connected to the Internet. If you need to save only occasional pages and don't need to do searches through those pages, then these tools will work reasonably well for you. But if you want to store pages in categories and folders and need to do full-text searches, then you'll need a third-party program. This hack shows you how to do both.

4.4.1 Reading Web Pages Offline Using IE

To save your current web page to your hard disk so you can read it again in Internet Explorer when you're not connected to the Internet, choose File Save As. You'll be given several options for how to save it. If you're not planning to edit the HTML of the file, your best bet is to save it as a Web "Archive, single file" (.mht). That way, you don't clutter up your hard disk with extra folders and files stored in different locations; everything is saved to a single file. Saving it as a "Web Page, complete" stores the HTML file as well as associated graphics, in a folder structure. Saving it as a "Web Page, HTML only" saves just the HTML file itself, with no associated graphics and no folder structure. You can also save it as a text file, but if you do, expect to spend time cleaning it up, because it saves all the text on the page, often in an unstructured way. To read the page after you've saved it to your disk, choose File Open, browse to the directory where you've saved the page, and open it.

There are times when you want to save not just the page you're on, but also the pages linked off it. To do that, you'll have to save your pages another way. First, save the page to your Favorites list by pressing Ctrl-D or choosing Favorites Add to Favorites. Then, right-click on the page where it's listed in Favorites and choose Make Available Offline. A wizard will appear. Follow its instructions, and when you get to the screen shown in Figure 4-6, tell it how many links deep you want pages saved. Be very careful when doing this, because even choosing to keep one link level can take up a substantial amount of hard disk space.