I saw this article today. Just curious how this might affect our statistics counts, if at all.

If you use a third party statistics generator that depends on cookies, then it will adversely affect the reliability of the numbers. If you're only using our stats or if the third party tool uses other technology than cookies, then it won't be a problem.

As long as we are discussing cookies, I am curious about a couple of things. A college computer course professor once told our class, during a lecture, that cookies affect just about everything we do when we are online, especially surfing. He also said viruses could be hidden in cookies.
Was he over exaggerating? Do they really impact other things, including hard drive health? And can a virus really be hidden in a cookie?
I trust your opinion, Eric. So I wanted to get some advice and tips and see how you feel about this, please.

I'm not an expert on this, but I do try to keep up with issues. I believe that viruses used to be able to take advantage of buffer overflow vulnerabilities in cookie handling but that this is now a non-issue. In any case, the content of the cookie would have to come from either the operator of the website you're visiting, a third-party component the website loads from another server, or through a cross-site scripting (XSS) attack. These vulnerabilities are generally getting harder and harder to take advantage of with each new generation of web browser software. The only significant concern with cookies these days is the monitoring and tracking of your activity on the internet and the concomitant degradation of privacy. This is the motivation behind Do-Not-Track features and third-party cookie blocking. It is the bizarre notion that since you bought the device, it should serve YOU rather than a pervasive advertising industry.

Because you as the admin of your site have the ability to add third-party content to your own sites, you may be exposing your visitors to XSS attacks if you haven't made sure your third-party code is from a reliable source. However, it is more likely that your site would be compromised by someone stealing your password either through using a shared, unsecured, public wireless connection or because you downloaded and ran a program or opened a file from an untrusted source. Those are the most common vectors of infection.

As for hard-drive health, etc., as computer security mechanisms evolve, concerns about physical damage to components do decrease (unless you are running commercial scale internet connected command-and-control systems), but if your machine is taken over by software which generates a very high level of hard-drive activity over a long period, the life of your hard drive will be shortened simply because hardware components have a limited lifespan.

Thanks a lot. I appreciate your reply. It has me a little worried though now because I thought the protection was being provided by Class Creator, on your servers, so we didn't need to be concerned with implementing the protection ourselves.

There's only so much we can do to protect you from yourself.

Not sure what the means. We follow the rules and don't do anything to jeopardize our online security or those of our classmates accounts respect your reply.

Eric B Bassey wrote:

There's only so much we can do to protect you from yourself.

Thanks, Eric. This is so true! All it takes is a search for a graphic and clicking on the wrong one to make me say NO!!!!!! I'm extremely cautious now-a-days and am about to move in a new direction.

As we all know - don't click on links you are not sure about. Be very careful surfing the web because your next click can jeopardize your security. Ugh! All it takes is that one moment...

It means we can't verify or vet the code that admins place on their pages. If you use code from a third-party source, you run the risk that that code could compromise the computer of anyone viewing the page containing it. There are no security measures we could possibly implement to eliminate that threat and still allow admins to control the content and style of their own pages.