Our only "newcomer" is Ralph Reid, our Vice President—and he's been with the group for quite a few years, and has filled in for absent officers several times. So we bring to you, our members, many years of experience. We will strive to serve you well.

(Ralph is starting off with a bang: He's taking a vacation to cruise the Southwest in his new RV, so he won't be at our July meeting.)

I'd like to thank Dave Eden, our immediate past President, for all of the time that he gave to our group; first as Vice President, and then as President.

In addition to serving as an officer for a number of years, he maintained our Web site, regaled us with funny tales of life as a corporate IT guru, and offered lots of great help on Windows, networks and Microsoft applications. Thanks, Dave! We all hope that life in Portland rewards you well.

Over the years I have written a number of columns about computer privacy and security.

One common privacy problem is caused by "hackers" who attempt to "probe" your system whenever you are online. They are looking for ways to extract information from your system. Worse, they sometimes are trying to take over your system remotely, in order to damage it from pure malice, or to use it to mount malicious attacks on other computers.

A "firewall" is a tool to help protect you, and your computer, from these invasive actions. It can alert you to the probes, and can deflect them. It can even electronically "hide" your computer from probes, making it seem, to the hacker, as if you are not connected to the Internet.

There are other computer problems that are not so active, and are not so malicious, but that can nonetheless be considered an intrusion on your electronic privacy. Some of them involve "cookies," used by ordinary businesses on the Web. I'll explain them by analogy, and compare them to the active probes of the hackers.

A hacker's probing attack is like a burglar casing a neighborhood, walking up and ringing your doorbell and peering in the windows to see how well locked-up your house is. That kind of snooping is probably against the law, I would guess; it's certainly not behavior accepted by most of our society.

In that analogy, using a firewall is like having a big, strong guard in your house, always on duty, always keeping a watchful eye on all the people coming and going in and out of your house. Or, if the firewall uses a so-called "stealth" mode, it is like having a Klingon cloaking device on your house, so that burglars don't even know that your house is there!

Now, Web cookies are quite different. One analogy is that cookies are like going to a supermarket and accepting a free sample of ice cream from a company representative standing at the end of the frozen foods aisle. While you are tasting the ice cream, the representative—let's say she is a sweet little old lady—is getting to know you a little. The next time you come to the store, the same little old lady is there. She recognizes you and remembers that you liked the chocolate ice cream.

There's nothing wrong with that: She's an official representative of the ice cream company; she's on the premises with the store's permission; and you walked up to her and interacted with her of your own volition.

The "cookie" in the analogy is the way she remembered you from one visit to the next. A human would merely remember your appearance, voice, and personality—that set of memories is the "cookie." The little old lady recognizes you by that cookie, and that recognition is what lets her remember that you like chocolate ice cream. Note that the cookie is separate from the knowledge of your preferences.

A Web site that you visit can't recognize you by your face or voice, and so it leaves a small text file on your hard drive, with the help of your Web browser. That's the "cookie" file. It's not a program; it's merely some text, usually containing some unique numbers or letters to help the company tell your visits apart from everybody else's visits to their Web site. Think of it as if the little old lady had pasted a paper tag on your shirt with a unique ID code, so that she would recognize you the next time you came into the store.

The ID doesn't usually have anything too personal or detailed about you in it; often it just looks like a string of random characters. The cookie is not the private information about you; it's merely a way of recognizing you. The private information is kept elsewhere, on the computers of the company that owns the Web page.

The Web page that left a cookie on your computer works together with your Web browser, letting the Web page read the cookie (or cookies) every time that you visit the same Web page. It's an eye-opener to realize that Web pages are active things, not merely text. Web pages DO things in concert with your Web browser. They are not like billboards alongside the "information superhighway"; perhaps they are more like barkers along a carnival fairway.

Now, if you provide any information to the Web page, perhaps while buying something online, or while downloading information that requires you to provide some personal information, the company can use the cookie to recognize you, personally, the next time you visit that site. You won't be just another anonymous Web surfer any more; you'll be somebody that the company knows.

So how is this an invasion of your privacy? Well, let's imagine that the sweet little old lady kept notes of your ice cream preferences, learned your name and other personal information while chatting with you, and then sold that information to some yogurt companies, so that they started sending you yogurt junk mail. That might not be quite what you expected when you accepted her free sample of ice cream.

There's more; let's assume that after a while, the ice cream company doesn't even bother to hand out free samples to get to know you. Instead, their sweet little old lady merely sits in the store manager's office, watching the store security cameras, taking notes on: What you buy; how long you spend looking at Sports Illustrated and/or Cosmopolitan in the magazine aisle; what medical and personal hygiene products you buy; how much alcohol you buy; how much extra cash back you get when you pay; what your address and credit card numbers are; and so on. She's collecting information by observing what you do in the store, and she's remembering it—and you don't know that she's doing it.

Her observations are tied to you by the "cookies" that let her recognize you, and they are secret; you don't know that she is remembering who you are, and associating you with all of this data.

Then after a while, you find that companies you have never heard of are filling up your mailbox with very specific ads for their products, or their financial services, or medical services for your private maladies. And other companies and stores know lots about you as soon as you walk in their door the first time.

In the same way, you probably don't know what cookies really are being left on your computer when you visit Web sites, and what cookies are being swapped between different companies, to track your buying and browsing habits. And you don't know how those companies are going to use that information about you and your habits.

It's not just companies that use cookies to track you. Some people have developed ways to extract private information from your computer via the Web, without alerting your firewall. Combined with cookies, those techniques mean that people, companies, and organizations that you don't know can collect information about you, even if you never offer them any information.

Other people don't care about such privacy issues. They trust that the companies, organizations, and individuals collecting the information will always have the best interests of their customers at heart.

And some folks would prefer to control their own privacy. For those folks, there are ways to control "cookies."

If you dig down far enough in your Web browser's options, you can probably find ways to make your browser always reject cookies, not allowing the Web site to put them on your computer. But that does get in the way of some trusted sites where you might need cookies in order to make the site work for you. For example, banking, credit card, or Web-based email services might insist on cookies.

The opposite option, always accepting cookies, is the default for popular browsers. But it doesn't clue you in to the large number of cookies being put on your system; it doesn't tell you which sites leave them there; and it doesn't show you what is in those cookie files. Plenty of folks probably don't even know that there are such things as cookies, or what cookies are all about.

Finally, your Web browser might let you set it up so that it always prompts you to accept or reject each cookie. Nowadays, that gets annoying pretty quickly, because so many sites try to put cookies on your system; and it still doesn't tell you what is in each cookie.

Cookie handlers work in several ways. The simplest ones merely delete any and all cookies that they find on your computer. More advanced cookie handlers have a list that you can customize. The list says which cookies you want to keep on your system and which ones should always be deleted automatically.

Finally, the best cookie handlers are "self-learning." They scan your computer continuously, looking for new cookies. When one appears, they notice it and they ask you whether to put it on the list of cookies to keep or cookies to delete.

To use a cookie handler, you have to leave your browser set up to always accept cookies. The browser doesn't know about the cookie handler; the browser always puts the cookies on your hard disk. If the cookie handler deletes the cookie later, then the next time you return to that Web page, the browser won't find a cookie for that page, and so the browser won't be able to share the cookie information with the Web page.

It seems that different versions of browsers change the places that they store cookies on your computer, so you usually have to have a specific cookie handler for your particular browser.

If you are interested in a cookie handler, see the ones listed on the "Software" page of Cookie Central. That site also has pages that give more information about cookies and related issues.

Hays Fisher won our monthly Chapter Member's Door Prize; congratulations, Hays!

Our next meeting will NOT be on the fourth Wednesday (because the meeting room was already reserved); instead, it will be on the fourth Thursday of July. Come on down to the big meeting room in the Davis branch of the Yolo County Public Library on Thursday, July 26, at 7:00 p.m. sharp!