Cookies – what are they, anyway?
These are, casually speaking, tiny crumbs of text that may be placed on your
computer by a web site, e. g. for memorizing user settings or your user name,
set a tag for recognizing you, etc. Whereas some uses are sensible, e. g.
memorizing user settings, there are also uses of a dubious nature, like
tracking your surfing characteristics and, in the extreme case, unambiguously
identifying you.
The browser stores these text snippets in a particular directory on your
harddisk and retrieves them from there when needed to send them to the server
that has set them when you are accessing it.
Could everybody spy on me now?
No, that's impossible, because cookies are exclusively transmitted to
the server that has set them. Transmitting them to a third party isn't possible
under normal circumstances. So this won't work with cookies alone and always
relies on the use of JavaScript that passes this information to third parties.
However, elements that are loaded from foreign servers are able to set cookies
that are coined to their domain which can subsequently be read. This, however,
can be denied in the browser settings.
These pages are never going to send any of its cookies to third parties.
Cookies used by this site
| Cookie | Used for | Validity |
|---|---|---|
| layout | Records various layout settings. | 1 year ¹) |
| settings | Stores all miscellaneous settings. | End of session |
| verbosity | Verbosity of the debugger | 1 year ¹) |
This site needs to use cookies to provide some functionalities. Disabling them would cause these functionalities to be limited or entirely disabled.
Disabling cookies
You have the option to limit setting cookies, both as far as the sites permitted to do so and the time frame that cookies persist are concerned, or disable it altogether in your browser.
