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Our staffers at the Antisocial Network tend to be generalists, although most of them are trained in technical and scientific fields. As a rule, they're smart enough to know the difference between general and specific topics. For instance, "changing spark plugs" is general; "changing spark plugs in a 1967 Camaro with a 327 V-8" is specific. Unfortunately, not everyone seems to understand the difference, which is why eHowian Melissa King is back already: she gave specific instructions to the general question "How to Permanently Delete Cookies."¹ For her (lack of) effort, she's getting an award...

Oh, King started out OK with a sort of general definition of a cookie in the internet sense:

"Cookies can remember your user preferences or password for a website, and can also customize a page so that it only shows certain content. Some cookies also track where on the webpage you click."

We think Melissa could have done a better job; such as defining a cookie as a file and reminding users that cookies allow companies to track not just "where on the webpage you click," but where you go on the web, period. Apparently Melissa hadn't heard of "safe surfing"... you'd think a "communications" major would have a better grasp of modern tech, no? Meanwhile, King came up with what our techies thought to be unusual process for deleting cookies; it's "a built-in Windows system utility [that] will permanently delete all cookies..." Besides the question of whether a system utility wouldn't be built-in, King's little solution to the problem had a major flaw: it only works for Internet Explorer.

That's right: Melissa apparently didn't know that the built-in Windows utility won't delete all the cookies from the computer if you use Firefox, Chrome, Tor, Safari, or any other browser: just IE. It will run, but it'll leave cookies from any other browser intact. That's not to mention that her solution was completely useless for Mac and Linux users. Duh...

So King's "solution" wasn't really a solution, is it... instead of telling you to check your browser's help or providing rudimentary instructions for any of the other heavily-used browsers, King acted as though there's only one browser and she had the secret. Feh: classic Dumbass of the Day thinking, but eHow published it anyway.

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. The URL was   ehow.com/how_7812111_permanently-delete-cookies.html

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