Safari Bakes Cookies
There are two kinds of cookies; one is sugar and sweet and good to eat and the other is made of snails and puppy dog tails. Cookies were an experiment to attempt to make the internet experience easier for the average person to navigate, storing favorite settings on websites, or preferences for particular areas so that when you go to www.banjoworld.com, you can go straight to "jugband blues" without having to go through the entire site every time. They have since become an evil tool to track where you go, what you do there, where you come from and where you go afterwards.
The good news is, you can burn these cookies and throw them out. Safari makes this process easy, and while we're at it, we're going to turn on the Pop-up window blocker. When you open Safari, click on the name "Safari" in the menu bar, right next to the Apple and "Edit" up on the top. When the menu comes down, select "Block Popup windows." Now open that same "Safari" menu again--there should be a check mark next to "Block Popup windows." Good. In that same menu, select "Preferences" right above it. A preferences window will come up with a top row of icons with things like General, Appearance and Security. Select "Security" and click the button that says "Only from sites you navigate to." That stops most advertisers from seeing where you came from and where you go afterwards, but as they get more clever, they are able to glean more information from less.
For better security, use Mozilla Firefox, which gives you more control over cookies. A final note of caution: some sites require cookies to function properly, such as some financial sites and other secured sites, but now that you know how to turn them off and on, they will only see what you want them to. This should help cut down on spam email as well, as cookies are one of the tools used to tailor email spam. Happy Baking! [Britt Godwin]