Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 12 that a Web server may seek to store a cookie on your
computer or in your account. If your browser is set to allow this,
then a Web server knows something about your past history and
can apply that knowledge to the popup windows it displays. In par
ticular, cookies could allow a Web server to know what you have
purchased or what you have browsed on its site in the past, and this
special information could be used to tailor ads to your apparent in
terests. For example, if you purchase fishing goods on an ecom
merce site, then that site will have a record of your having pur
chased an aquatic animal guide, a fishing pole, and a fishing
vest—perhaps in a customer database. Through the use of cookies,
the company could identify that you are a customer, and if so,
which one (the one who bought fishing gear). It could then initiate
a popup window advertising a deepsea fishing tour of the coast of
Nantucket, which would please the tour company because the
money they are paying to advertise on this site is going to good use:
you, their target audience, are seeing their ad. Thus, by using a
cookie, the company could review its customer database, identify
your past purchases, select ads for related products, and send those
ads to your browser for display either in its regular page or in pop
up windows.
When you're browsing the Web and popup advertisements or
the like appear on your computer screen, they may not be welcome,
but often you can recognize that they are appearing in response to
an action on your part (e.g., submitting a search request for fishing,
loading a previously viewed page, or purchasing fishing gear). Why,
then, do people receive random, unsolicited email if they have
never expressed interest in anything remotely related to the spam
mail's topic? This, in part, results from the way that email works,
which is our next topic for discussion.
Electronic mail (or email) was first developed in the mid1970s
to send simple textual messages. Early email messages contained
characters you could type on a keyboard, and there was no worry
about fonts, colors, pictures, audio, and the like. Communication
was relatively straightforward, using the Internet packets discussed
in Chapters 8 and 9—an email message was placed in one or more
