COOKIES?!? (and sessions)

So you want to know about cookies, eh? Well before today most of us in the Ronin cohort probably didn't have a concrete idea of what they were either. But here's a little something to show you the gist of it.

From our Wiki search, we have gathered that cookies are essentially "pieces of data sent from website and stored in user's web browser while the user is browsing that website." For example, cookies might be used to remember things like passwords, items in a "shopping cart" or buttons that someone has pressed.

Here's a brief explanation of a few types of cookies:

Session cookie:

Stores information temporarily until you close your browser.

Persistent cookie:

Stores information for a predetermined period of time or until a certain date/time.

Secure and HTTPonly cookies:

Can only be accessed in certain ways i.e. only on encrypted connections (secure cookie) or not accessible by a non-HTTp API (Application Program Interface).

What about sessions? Sessions are like session cookies, except cookies can be blocked by web browsers. Sessions cannot be blocked in the same way.