WT A cookie, also known as an HTTP cookie, web cookie, or browser cookie, is usually a small piece of data sent from

a website and stored in a user's web browser while a user is browsing a website. When the user browses the same website in the future, the data stored in the cookie can be retrieved by the website to notify the website of the user's previous activity. Cookies were designed to be a reliable mechanism for websites to remember the state of the website or activity the user had taken in the past. This can include clicking particular buttons, logging in, or a record of which pages were visited by the user even months or years ago. Although cookies cannot carry viruses, and cannot install malware on the host computer, tracking cookies and especially third-party tracking cookies are commonly used as ways to compile long-term records of individuals' browsing histories a major privacy concern that has prompted European and US law makers to take action. Other kinds of cookies perform essential functions in the modern Web. Perhaps most importantly, authentication cookies are the most common method used by web servers to know whether the user is logged in or not, and which account they are logged in under. Without such a mechanism, the site would not know whether to send a page containing sensitive information, or require the user to authenticate himself by logging-in. The security of an authentication cookie generally depends on the security of the issuing website and the user's web browser. If not implemented correctly, a cookie's data can be intercepted by a hacker to gain unapproved access to the user's data and possibly to the originating website. Session cookie A session cookie only lasts for the duration of users using the website. A web browser normally deletes session cookies when it quits. A session cookie is created when no Expires directive is provided at cookie creation time. Persistent cookie A persistent cookie[ will outlast user sessions. If a persistent cookie has its Max-Age set to 1 year, then, within the year, the initial value set in that cookie would be sent back to the server every time the user visited the server. This could be used to record a vital piece of information such as how the user initially came to this website. For this reason persistent cookies are also called tracking cookies.

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WT Secure cookie A secure cookie has the secure attribute enabled and is only used via HTTPS, ensuring that the cookie is always encrypted when transmitting from client to server. This makes the cookie less likely to be exposed to cookie theft via eavesdropping. HttpOnly cookie The HttpOnly cookie is supported by most modern browsers. [13][14] On a supported browser, an HttpOnly session cookie will be used only when transmitting HTTP (or HTTPS) requests, thus restricting access from other, non-HTTP APIs (such as JavaScript). This restriction mitigates but does not eliminate the threat of session cookie theft via cross-site scripting (XSS). This feature applies only to session-management cookies, and not other browser cookies. Third-party cookie First-party cookies are cookies set with the same domain (or its subdomain) in your browser's address bar. Third-party cookies are cookies being set with different domains from the one shown on the address bar (i.e. the web pages on that domain may feature content from a third-party domain - e.g. an advertisement run by www.advexample.com showing advert banners). (Privacy setting options in most modern browsers allow you to block third-party tracking cookies). For example: Suppose a user visits www.example1.com, which sets a cookie with the domain ad.foxytracking.com. When the user later visits www.example2.com, another cookie is set with the domain ad.foxytracking.com. Eventually, both of these cookies will be sent to the advertiser when loading their ads and visiting their website. The advertiser can then use these cookies to build up a browsing history of the user across all the websites this advertiser has footprints on. Supercookie A "supercookie" is a cookie with a public suffix domain, like .com, .co.uk or k12.ca.us. Most browsers, by default, allow first-party cookiesa cookie with domain to be the same or sub-domain of the requesting host. For example, a user visiting www.example.com can have a cookie set with domain www.example.com or .example.com, but not .com. A supercookie with domain .com would be blocked by browsers; otherwise, a malicious website, like attacker.com, could set a supercookie with

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WT domain .com and potentially disrupt or impersonate legitimate user requests to example.com. The Public Suffix List is a cross-vendor initiative to provide an accurate list of domain name suffixes changing. Older versions of browsers may not have the most up-to-date list, and will therefore be vulnerable to certain supercookies. Zombie cookie Main article: Zombie cookie A zombie cookie is any cookie that is automatically recreated after a user has deleted it. This is accomplished by a script storing the content of the cookie in some other locations, such as the local storage available to Flash content, HTML5 storages and other client side mechanisms, and then recreating the cookie from backup stores when the cookie's absence is detected. Uses Session management Cookies may be used to maintain data related to the user during navigation, possibly across multiple visits. Cookies were introduced to provide a way to implement a "shopping cart" (or "shopping basket"), a virtual device into which users can store items they want to purchase as they navigate throughout the site. Shopping basket applications today usually store the list of basket contents in a database on the server side, rather than storing basket items in the cookie itself. A web server typically sends a cookie containing a unique session identifier. The web browser will send back that session identifier with each subsequent request and shopping basket items are stored associated with a unique session identifier. Allowing users to log in to a website is a frequent use of cookies. Typically the web server will first send a cookie containing a unique session identifier. Users then submit their credentials and the web application authenticates the session and allows the user access to services. Personalization Cookies may be used to remember the information about the user who has visited a website in order to show relevant content in the future. For example a web server may send a cookie containing the username last used to log in to a website so that it may be filled in for future visits.

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WT Many websites use cookies for personalization based on users' preferences. Users select their preferences by entering them in a web form and submitting the form to the server. The server encodes the preferences in a cookie and sends the cookie back to the browser. This way, every time the user accesses a page, the server is also sent the cookie where the preferences are stored, and can personalize the page according to the user preferences. For example, the Wikipedia website allows authenticated users to choose the webpage skin they like best; the Google search engine once allowed users (even non-registered ones) to decide how many search results per page they want to see. Tracking Tracking cookies may be used to track internet users' web browsing habits. This can also be done in part by using the IP address of the computer requesting the page or the referrer field of the HTTP request header, but cookies allow for greater precision. This can be demonstrated as follows: 1. If the user requests a page of the site, but the request contains no cookie, the server presumes that this is the first page visited by the user; the server creates a random string and sends it as a cookie back to the browser together with the requested page; 2. From this point on, the cookie will be automatically sent by the browser to the server every time a new page from the site is requested; the server sends the page as usual, but also stores the URL of the requested page, the date/time of the request, and the cookie in a log file. By analyzing the log file collected in the process, it is then possible to find out which pages the user has visited, and in what sequence.

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WT

Introduction An intelligent agent is software that assists people and act on their behalf. Intelligent agents work by allowing people to delegate work that they could have done, to the agent software. Agents can perform repetitive tasks, remember things you fo rgot, intelligently summarize complex data, learn from you and even make recommendations to you. What kind of problems Intelligent Agents can solve To understand how intelligent agents work, it is best to examine some of the practical problems that intelligent agent can help solve. An intelligent agent can help you find and filter information when you are looking at corporate data or surfing the Internet and don't know where the right information is. It could also customize information to your preferences, thus saving you time of handling it as more and more new information arrived each day on the Internet. Applications of Intelligent agent Here are some of the examples that use intelligent agent which illustrate some of the important ways intelligent agents can help solve real problems and make today's computer system easier to use.

Customer

Help

Desk

Customer help desk job is to answer calls from customers and find the answer to their

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WT problems. When customers call with a problems, the help desk person manually look up answers from hardcopy manuals, but those hardcopy manuals have been replaced with searchable CD-ROM collections, and some companies even offer searches over the Internet. Instead of hiring help desk consultants, or having the customers search through the internet for an answer, with intelligent agent, customer describe the problem and the agent automatically searches the appropriate databases (either CD-ROM, or the Internet), then presents a consolidated answer with the most likely first. This is a good example of using intelligent agent to find and filter information.

Web

Browser

Intelligent

A web browser intelligent, such as an IBM Web Browser Intelligent is an agent which helps you keep track of what web site you visited and customizes your view of the web by automatically keeping a bookmark list, ordered by how often and how recent you visit the site. It allows you to search for any words you've seen in your bookmark track, and takes you back to the site allowing you to find and filter quickly. It also helps you find where you were by showing you the entire different track you took starting at the current page. It also let you know by notifying you when sites you like are updated, and it could also automatically download pages for you to browse offline.

Personal

Shopping

Assistant

IBM's Personal Shopping Assistant uses intelligent agent technology to help the Internet shopper or the Internet shop owner to find the desired item quickly without having to browse page after page of the wrong merchandise. With the Personal Shopping Assistant, stores and merchandise are customized as the intelligent agent learned the shopper's preferences as he/she enters in any on-line mall or stores or looking at specific merchandise. It could also arrange the merchandise so that the items you like t he most are the first one you see. Finally, Personal Shopping Assistant automates your shopping experience by reminding you to shop when a birthday, an anniversaries, or item that is on sale occurred.

Characteristic of Intelligent Agent

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WT All agents are autonomous, which means that an agent has control over its own actions. All agents are also goal-driven. Agents have a purpose and act accordance with that purpose. There are several ways of making goals known to an agent, and are listed below:

An agent could be driven by a script with pre-defines action which would then define the agent's goals.

An agent could also be a program and as long as the program is driven by goals and has other characteristics of agents.

An agent could also be driven by rules, and the rules would define the agent's goals.

There are also embedded agent goals, such as "planning" methodologies, and in some cases the agent could change its own goals over time.

An agent could also senses changes in its environment and responds to these changes. This characteristic of the agent is at the core of delegation and automation. For example, you tell your assistant "when x happens, do y" and the agent is always waiting for x to happen. An agent continue to work even when the user is gone, which means that an agent could run on a server, but in some cases, an agent run on the user systems. In a Multi-Agent System, agents are social, this means that they communicate with other agents. Some agents learn or change their behavior base on their previous experiences. Some agents are mobile, meaning they move from machine to machine to be closer to data they may need to process and do so without network delays. Finally, some agents attempt to be believable, such that they are represented as an entity visible or audible to the user and may even have aspects of emotion or personality. Enhance search engine performance with Intelligent Agent Before we rush into how an intelligent agent is used to enhance a search engine performance, let's look at what makes an agent different from a search engine. Some of the search engine such as Yahoo, Lycos, and WebCrawler seem to match the description s of basic intelligent agent. The main difference is that an agent is more interactive and can perform many tasks at different locations. First of all, for example, if you search using a search engine, such as Lycos or Yahoo, you may get a list of match es, which you might have to follow and possibly not get your information. Secondly, using a search

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WT engine may increase the percentage of those matches that might not be relevant to the inquiry. However, if you were to use an agent, the agent could submit your keyword(s) to many different search engines and follow those corresponding links and gather the information without any intervention from the user. An intelligent agent uses such technology as the spider, which is also used in the traditional web search engines. However the spider will be a tool which will be used and trained by the user to search the web for specific types of information resources. The agent can be personalized by its owner so that it can build up a picture of individual likes, dislikes and precise information needs. Over time, an agent will build up an accurate picture of user information needs. It will learn from past experiences, as a user will have the option of reviewing search results and rejecting any information sources, which are not relevant or useful. Agent communication languages Some of the agent communication languages include KQML (Knowledge Query and Manipulation Languages), AOP (Agent Oriented Programming) and Agent Talk.

KQML is a language and protocol used for exchanging information and knowledge. KQML is both a message format and a message-handling protocol to support run-time knowledge sharing among agents. KQML can be used as a language for an application program to interact with an intelligent system or for two or more intelligent systems to share knowledge in support of cooperative problem solving.

AOP is an interpreter for programs written in a language called AO. AO is a programming language for the paradigm of Agent-Oriented Programming. It is currently under development at Stanford.

Agent Talk is a coordination protocol description language for multiagent systems. Agent Talk allows coordination protocols to be defined incrementally and to be easily customized to suit application domains by incorporating an inheritance mechanism.

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WT Spider A program that automatically fetches Web pages. Spiders are used to feed pages to search engines. It's called a spider because it crawls over the Web. Another term for these programs is WebCrawler. Because most Web pages contain links to other pages, a spider can start almost anywhere. As soon as it sees a link to another page, it goes off and fetches it. Large search engines, like Alta Vista, have many spiders working in parallel.

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