BTTB Alumni Website Security Information

The BTTB Alumni Website makes use of some standard browser techniques in order to present a more interesting experience, and to protect your information. To make full use of these you must have both Javascript and Cookies enabled for our website.

In addition we use a trick to encode your email address in the link:(#profiles, profiles page) so that even though it looks like the correct email address to you, a spambot will see only unusable gibberish.

More About JavaScript and Cookies

Cookies and JavaScript were developed by Netscape and introduced around 1995 as key technologies in the first widely-used Web browser. As such, both cookies and JavaScript were specifically designed with Internet security in mind. They have been thoroughly tested over the last decade and their security record is so clean, that both have been enabled by default in nearly every release of every major Web browser since their introduction.

Cookies are small text files on your computer into which a Web site can store tiny bits of information. There are only two types of information that can be stored in cookies:

  • information you provide to the site, via a form, or
  • information the site creates on its own

    • Cookies allow us to "recognize" you and present appropriate information to you, such as filtering out news items you've seen, without requiring you to "login" to each and every Web page you visit.

    Cookies can not be used to infect your computer with a virus or worm, nor to otherwise "hack" into your computer to obtain information about you.

    Another security feature of Cookies is that they can only be read by the site that created them. In other words, www.bttbalumni.ca can't read cookies set by Amazon.com, or vice-versa.

    www.bttbalumni.ca uses cookies to store non-identifying information about you, such as when you last visited us, to enhance your browsing experience.

    JavaScript is a fairly simple programming language designed specifically for use in Web browsers. Unlike most programming languages, JavaScript does not have any provisions to either read from or write to any files stored on your computer other than cookies. Thus, it does not allow Web sites to "hack" into your computer to learn anything about you. Nor can Javascript be used to "take control" of your computer.

    JavaScript is necessary because it allows www.bttbalumni.ca and other Web sites to improve the ease-of-use of their sites, rather than requiring cumbersome and clunky workarounds.