I've just been cruising thru the freestuff pages (not clicking on anything yet), and I keep getting hit by a request from "membres.lycos.fr" to set cookies, which I refuse every time. I've never been to ANY site with that address, and why is it trying to set cookies inside Renderosity???

Because absolutely every linked part (like pictures) can try to set cookies - the commercial banners will set some all of the times. This is a very dangerous thing, because they will give you an ID code and track you across all visited pages, now and in every future session. Even worse - if they buy an online shop (and they do this quite frequently) they get the customer database, and if they sync the data (through the logged IP addresses) they will get your full personal details. For that reason - try to use a browser that trashes cookies frequently, or do it manually.

Well, I trash cookies regularly, like after every session if I go somewhere other than my preferred hangouts like here. And I always have it set to notify me before accepting and 99.99% of the time I tell it NO, IF I have cookies activated at all. Thanks for the info.

The reason it's trying to set a cookie is because the image is hosted on that site, as it's linking "live" to there the site thinks it's getting a visit every time the image gets called and hey presto wants you to have a cookie. At least, that's how it seems. :) Thanks be that it's not one of those nasty little sites that tries to pop up half a dozen windows every visit, like one I tried to download from earlier. :(

We are definitely going to have to get out the industrial size can of raid, and get that one. Thanks for the heads up!

What is "raid"? I am British and I am not familiar with USA pesticides. I am in some Yahoo email groups. I have tried running in "ask my permission before accepting cookies" mode, and whenever I was in Yahoo I was machine gunned with cookie requests, such as a burst of 5 of them whenever I looked at another Yahoo page. And a few months ago Yahoo started refusing to let me proceed unless I accepted cookies.

Raid is an insect killer, and it is sold in the UK in most supermarkets and hardware stores. I know because I buy it. Crawling, flying, swinging on vines, flying little aeroplanes, raid kills bugs. :)

I'm not very observant. Apparently Norton Internet Security has been denying cookies in Free Stuff for months. I finally looked down near the bottom right of my Internet Explorer screen and saw this little flashing icon. I clicked on it, and saw some reports like this one. I guess these are harmless cookies, right? 

That's why I don't "Yahoo!" g

well, lycos did have a lot of pop-ups, I have a lycos email account, I sent one email complaining about having six pop-up windows open when logging into account, a week later not one. they actually are starting to get rid of javascripts from thier servers, as java is being used to code viruses. the cookies here aren't needed, but aren't harmfull.

now it is time that Yahoo stopped wasting users' time downloading that stupid "online casino".

~L~ well, at yahoo all they are is " a bunch of yahoos " ~scrambling for the door for this one...remembering the organization that actually chose that as a name in Toronto~