Cookies:    Believe it or not, cookies are not an evil technology created by the government or large corporations to spy on you. They can't read your thoughts or download your files and generally are not very harmful. What cookies are are little files that contain a line or so of text. like the name "joe" or the number 1. The purpose of them is to create a way for a web page to allow you the client to store a little piece of information that the web site needs to actually keep between pages. So when you are buying a few things from an online store every time you add something to your basket, it might be stored in a cookie, that's why every time you go click on a new item, that information isn't lost from page to page.    Unfortunately, like all good things, jerks have tried to find ways to exploit it. At the worst, cookies can allow web sites to possibly get a glimpse at what other sites you have surfed through. The idea being if one site gives you a cookie another site may be able to look at it and say, oh, I see you visited amazon.com. now typically a cookie is owned by the site that made it and other sites cant actually use cookies that don't belong to them, so the security risk really isn't that high... but some more un-reputable sites like to barrage your machine with what are called tracking cookies who's express purpose is to leave a footprint of where you have been. So, if you are paranoid about these kind of things, you can try limiting what kind of cookies can be set, or... you can just delete all your cookies after browsing. Doing this is easy in Internet Explorer 6.    Deleting Cookies: To delete all cookies, just go to your Tools menu at the top then select internet options. A window will open and half way down under the general tab (which is the one open by default) you will see a button "Delete Cookies...". Press it and you are done.   Or get CCleaner from www.ccleaner.com its an all purpose junk file deletion utility.    Limiting Cookie Rights: Once again go to your "Tools" menu in Internet Explorer then "Internet Options". This time go to the privacy tab. There you will find a scroll bar with settings like high medium and low, you can drag this up for more security (but this may limit some functionality on pages) or you can hit the "Advanced" button which will take you to a window where you can make your own settings after checking the override box. If you really want to find our when and where cookies come from on the web you can change these options to prompt. When you do this, every time a page wants to set a cookie, you will be asked if you want to accept it. This is very educational at first, but you will soon tire of having to hit the "Yes" button 6 times on every web page you browse to. But at the same time it also shows you who the good guys and bad guys of cookie use are.