If I miss the finer points of the technology, please none of you techies laugh at me.... I'm harmless. But many of you may wish to do a small "operation" on your PC. A cookie is a web message that a Web Server sends to your browser when you visit a site that "sets" cookies (which is most of them). So far, with only one exception, cookies are relatively harmless. They provide marketing data to those sites that hire a "cookie setter", they count "hits", they enable a site to "recognize you" (Amazon being a good example), etc. Cookies themselves shouldn't be a matter of great concern unless you are visiting sites like "how to make anthrax for fun and profit" or something like that. Cookies themselves cannot give a third party access to your personal data, but they do store the information you may have inadvertently provided just by clicking on a site. In other instances it is possible to gather your name and address presumably to provide to advertisers. Earlier this month, a "cookie installing" company (there are only about a dozen or so of them) named DoubleClick acknowledged that it was under FTC investigation for selling to their customers a "match-up" of marketing data hooked TO INDIVIDUALS. The FTC regards this as a serious matter of privacy invasion and most web users would too. In the meanwhile, why wait on these turkeys to devise a way to circumvent a justice deparment order. Just get rid of your DoubleClick cookies BY YOURSELF. Its easy to zap your DoubleClick cookies periodically and leave all the others intact. In addition to the publicity afforded by the FTC investigation, if and when it becomes general knowledge that many, many users are zapping DoubleClick cookies obviously the "value" of DoubleClick to their customers should diminish sizably......a proposition DoubleClick richly deserves. Its simple: 1) open your Windows explorer 2) there is a file simply called "Windows", double click on it. 3) under Windows there is a directory named "cookies" 4) there will likely be a "warning" not to delete any of these files.....big deal, naturally they don't want you to delete them.....they make money selling them....ignore the implication that this deleting might somehow "harm" your computer. 5) double click on "cookies"......depending on how many sites you visit you may pop up between a dozen to several hundred "names" of cookie companies which will appear. You will recognize many of them but there will likely only be about a a dozen or so of them in total. 6) go down the list and high light the ones named "DoubleClick"...."select" them and then just merely ZAP them with "delete". 7) depending on your frame of mind repeat the operation above every once in a while 8) forward this message to a friend suggesting they might wish to perform the "fix" and advise friends on their mailing list to do so as well. In addition, you will sometimes see "DoubleClick" shown as a part of a web address if you get a page or two into a site. You might wish to tell that site that you won't be coming again because of their use of DoubleClick.