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| For your information, this page will explain more about what cookies are, and how the IT Resource Center uses them. |
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| What is a cookie? |
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| To provide a rich, powerful, and personalized user interface, Web applications like the IT Resource Center often need to remember, across multiple pages, information which you gave several pages ago. For example, many in the IT Resource Center need to know your User ID, registered name, e-mail address, linked System Handles and Warranties, Online Service Orders, and so forth. When you login with your User ID, you enter (or implicitly pull-up) all of this information at that time. But the subsequent pages you visit after logging-in need to know this information, too, without requiring you to re-login. |
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| This problem is aggravated by the fact that Web servers are generally not built to inherently "remember" themselves the information they need to keep track of in order to create the Web pages you see. And when the information needs to remembered for a long time - weeks or even months - that is another problem. |
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| Cookies are a conventional mechanism for helping Web servers remember such state information from one page to subsequent pages, even across long periods of time. A cookie is a piece of data created by a Web server and sent to your browser when you connect to the server. If you choose to let your browser accept the cookie, it will remember it and return it back to the Web server the next time you connect to it. In other words, since the Web server cannot keep track of the data itself, it asks your browser to remember the data on its behalf, and remind the server as-needed later. |
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| So, for example, with the first page you access in the IT Resource Center, your browser receives some cookies containing the ITRC will need to know on subsequent pages. For its part, the browser transparently sends the information back to the IT Resource Center as you navigate, "reminding" the Web server who you are. |
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| Note that cookies are just data that the Web server already knew at the time it asked your browser to remember the data on its behalf. Besides remembering the cookie and sending it back to the server, your browser doesn't do anything with it, and it doesn't do anything with your computer. For example, a cookie cannot contain code which your browser executes. A cookie cannot read data off of your disk and return it to the server. A cookie cannot "spy" on your visits to other Web sites. |
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| There are several resources available on the Internet for more information about cookies. Cookies are a specification of Netscape Communications Corporation. |
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| How does the IT Resource Center use cookies? |
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| The IT Resource Center employs several cookies, each of which has a different purpose: |
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- The most important are a pair of cookies which work with the URL on each hyperlink you follow to securely point to your login information (name, System Handles, ITRC Online Service Orders, etc). (The Web server stores everyone's login information, so these cookies work with the URL to securely point to yours.)
- Another pair of cookies remember your User ID and e-mail address in ITRC sessions, to help you login next time.
- Another cookie facilitates redirection to additional IT Resource Center sites when the one you first attempted is busy.
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| What happens if I reject the IT Resource Center cookies? |
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| Whenever you connect to any page in the IT Resource Center, our Web server will ask your browser to remember one or more cookies, if you have not already gotten them. In some cases, if you reject some of these cookies, subsequent ITRC pages you enter will not able to find your state information. For example, even though you did already login, on subsequent pages you will appear to not be logged-in. So until you accept the cookies, you will be asked repeatedly to login again. |
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| For this reason, it is important that you accept these cookies in order to use the IT Resource Center. For how to do this, read about cookies and the IT Resource Center. |
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