Columnist John C. Dvorak, in his Inside Track column in the February 26, 2002 PC Magazine reminds readers that there are a number of infamous sites that download "cookies" that trace your web activity and report it back. These "trojan" cookies usually come from the pop-up adds, although a few sites also dump them on you.

The majority of "cookies" are meant to be helpful, but if you have a "doubleclick" or "valueclick" - or a number of others - on your machine, you are being "tracked."

Mr. Dvorak suggests Ad-Aware, which is a free download (www.lavasoftusa.com in case my clicky doesn't work) and which will scan your machine for any known "trojan" cookies.

Note that these "cookies" are not viruses - and your antivirus software will not detect/disable them. They're just scum that you'd probably rather not have on your machine.

The maker of this program is German, and the translation to English on help and info files is a little "spotty," but the software runs cleanly on my Win98 and Win2000 machines - and it detected all of the "trojan" cookies I knew I had picked up in the past day of web use. (I usually delete cookies - except mudcat's - daily.)

The free version is described as a "beta," although it appears to be an earlier version of the shareware ($15 US) Ad-Aware Plus which is also available at the site.

The truly paranoid (Mr. Dvorak's term) may want to also look at www.spycop.com for programs to find and delete "keystroke tracers." I haven't been there yet, but will probably look at their stuff in the next couple of days.

John