Cookies question

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LotsOfZeros

LotsOfZeros

^^^ Bi-Winning ^^^
Feb 9, 2008
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www.makemoniesonline.com
I was wondering what ways a cookie can find it's way to my PC.
I ran a few tests and I have discovered that the come from the initial visit and most likely a hotlinked image, such as a banner, etc.

How then, does a cookie from website.com end up on my PC if I never visited website.com nor were there any banners or images from website.com located on any of the sites I have visited.

Here was one of my experiments. I navigated to somesite.com/webpage.php, then cleared all of my cookies. I then hit reload and checked the cookies where I noticed a brand new cookie from website.com. I clicked view>page source and saw no reference to website.com anywhere.

I'm a n00b at this sort of thing. Explanations from you php programming pros are encouraged.
 


redirects, flash, popups, frames, toolbars, spyware or even a background app that accesses the web.
 
^^ all of the above with hidden iframes being the most common

+ I'm pretty sure the hot linked image is possible with some crafty .htaccess tricks. Something like rewrite .jpg to .php then dump cookie (via frame or whatever) and present the image as the user expected.

I've never tried this particular version of cookie stuffing but it sounds theoretically possible.
 
Well I tested this here on WF and keep getting NeverBlue, Copeac, Marketleverage, Aweber, Adbrite and Hostgator cookies. Some of them showing affiliate referrer types of IDs and such.

I don't see any banners like that here.
 
LotsOfZeros said:
Well I tested this here on WF and keep getting NeverBlue, Copeac, Marketleverage, Aweber, Adbrite and Hostgator cookies. Some of them showing affiliate referrer types of IDs and such.

I don't see any banners like that here.
Click to expand...

The banners are at the top in an iframe. Those cookies are set by tracking pixels.
 
yeah, I see the frame for the banners below the comment

Code: 
<!-- START ADCYCLE IFRAME RICH MEDIA CACHE-BUST CODE for Top of Forum -->

but where are the tracking pixels? wouldn't those be like a 1x1 image file hosted on another domain?
 
LotsOfZeros said:
yeah, I see the frame for the banners below the comment

Code: 
<!-- START ADCYCLE IFRAME RICH MEDIA CACHE-BUST CODE for Top of Forum -->
but where are the tracking pixels? wouldn't those be like a 1x1 image file hosted on another domain?
Click to expand...

Could be, its really just a generic term for an image that puts up a cookie. The banner itself probably sets the cookie. Any image can set a cookie.♠
 
LotsOfZeros said:
soooo

how do I do that for one of my sites?
Click to expand...
I assume you mean you want to do cookie stuffing? Cookie stuffing is fraud but tracking cookies aren't. Tracking cookies are just there to count how many people view the banner vs click on them and to ensure that the publisher gets paid. Most networks use them. Cookie stuffing is when you purposely hide and set a cookie on someones browser as if they actually clicked on the banner. Then if they ever do buy something from that site or fill the offer than you get the credit. The obvious way to be successful at this is of course volume.

To set a cookie you modrewrite an image in your .htaccess to a script that writes out the image in binary format. So in other words when the person pulls image.jpg that goes to image.php which then grabs the real image.jpg and prints it out to the screen in binary form so its as if the user actually pulled the original image. Then you get the script to set the cookies you'd like to stuff. This can be tricky because there are rules for cookies. IE. only cookies that came from the original domain can be set/edited/read by...sorta. <-do some reading on setting/reading and editing cookies to know what i mean. Then you signup with a lot of affiliate programs and offers and stuff as many cookies into the image as possible. Then distribute the image url and try to put it where the people are, eg. your own sites.

I know thats vague but then again the whole practice is, its a lot of figuring out on your own and frankly I've been out of the cookie stuffing game for so long I have no idea what techniques still work and what don't.
 
Deliguy said:
To set a cookie you modrewrite an image in your .htaccess to a script that writes out the image in binary format. So in other words when the person pulls image.jpg that goes to image.php
Click to expand...

What intrigued me is that I was always under the impression this would affect all of my .jpg and .php files in that domain.

- but I guess it's all in how elegantly you write the .htaccess commands
 
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