Automate Your Business

Archive for the ‘Cookie Manager’ Category

In response to my email announcement about Cookie Manager yesterday (which had a faulty link – sorry about that! I’ve sent an update this morning), someone asked whether it worked with Flash Cookies.

The simple answer: No.

The reason: I’d never heard of them before.

But I’ve had a quick look into them, and one issue they produce is that the location they are stored in varies dramatically across things like which Flash version is installed on the PC, and which language the PC is set to. Even a little thing like the purchase of Macromedia (the originators of Flash) by Adobe meant that folder locations changed from having Macromedia in them to having Adobe in them.

So, it’s not going to be a quick update for me to produce, and even that’s assuming that it’s possible. The Flash cookies are just files, but it seems those files could be used for a lot more than normal “tracking data” kinds of things – they can contain data for online Flash games, configuration settings from Flash-based websites, (eg, a “don’t play that ear-splitting cacophany when I’m visiting the site because I normally play subtle music when working!” option), etc.

So… I’ll do more investigation and a proof-of-concept, and if that looks good, I’ll release an update to cope with Flash cookies.

Although something just occurred to me whilst writing this: I suppose another option would be to disable Flash or prevent it being loaded, whilst you’ve got Cookie Manager running… I’ll look into that as well.

I’ve just published the user manual for Cookie Manager, which will give you a better idea of how the software works.