You must accept two cookies once your password is accepted, or else the system won't be able to let you in.
We at Washington Apple Pi understand that some members have concerns about browser cookies, and the potential for abuse by aggressive marketing firms and digital bandits. In fact the members of the TCS committee are arguably more proactively security-conscious than most, so we've been very careful and deliberate about this.
The cookies we use for the TCS are the most conservative possible combination:
By using cookies to maintain our session state, we're able to pass around bookmarks between ourselves that point directly to messages and boards and such. You can enter a message with a URL that refers to information you've found. We can put announcements on the Pi's other web pages that refer to discussion topics on the TCS.
If we didn't use cookies, we'd be stuck with something like the Apple Store, which uses cryptic URLs that can't be bookmarked. To illustrate, if you direct someone to an item in the Apple Store, they have to go in through the front door and, one-by-one, follow every click to get where you were before. This is appropriate for an online store which changes inventory and specials frequently, but it's not as flexible as we'd like for a community bulletin board.
Nearly all browsers (Netscape 4.x being the exception) allow selective handling of cookies, on a per-domain basis. This means that you can instruct iCab, or Internet Explorer, or OmniWeb, or Netscape 6 or the others to accept temporary session cookies for web servers in the "wap.org" domain, regardless of your other settings.
We encourage you to investigate this option in your browser, to ensure that your online browsing is as safe and secure as possible. Have fun!
(Original PDF version of this note from the 1/26/01 general meeting)