How to change username in cookies? e.g. [email protected]

Windows XP Home Edition, version 2002, Service Pack 3
Internet Explorer 8

Hello:

Currently all the cookies generated by Internet Explorer include my family
name in the username section before the "@", e.g. . I
assume that is because my family name was used as the Windows account name,
which now shows beside "Registered To: when you right-click My Computer
Properties General.

I want to remove that family name from future cookies. What do I have to do?
If I simply use the User Accounts Control Panel to change the account name
that is displayed, will that change future cookies?

Or, does the username in cookies come from the user directory name?

If it's the latter, from the user directory name, then is the best method
to create a new Windows user profile, and then copy user data from the old
user profile to the new
profile as detailed here?:
http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;811151

I read about that method, and another method that involves editing the
registry key "RegisteredOwner" at
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion, so I'm
seeking to know the best method.

And, if I then do copy over the user data from the old user profile to the new
profile, will my applications all work afterwards retaining my prefs,
settings, etc., or will I need to edit any paths anywhere?

Thanks!

franklin-xy wrote:

Currently all the cookies generated by Internet Explorer include my family
name in the username section before the "@", e.g. . I
assume that is because my family name was used as the Windows account name,
which now shows beside "Registered To: when you right-click My Computer
Properties General.

The cookie (a text file) contains info you used at the site, for login.
If you want to change what the site records in their cookie saved on
your host, change your login or account on that site.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_cookie

"VanguardLH" wrote:

franklin-xy wrote:

Currently all the cookies generated by Internet Explorer include my family
name in the username section before the "@", e.g. . I
assume that is because my family name was used as the Windows account name,
which now shows beside "Registered To: when you right-click My Computer
Properties General.

The cookie (a text file) contains info you used at the site, for login.
If you want to change what the site records in their cookie saved on
your host, change your login or account on that site.

You have missed the point. The issue is not the contents of the cookie. The
filename of each cookie file contains my Windows username in the section
before the "@", e.g. , comes from the Windows account name.
That username is identical for every cookie produced from my browsing, and
as it has my family name I wish to change it as that information is visible
to http traffic. So, I will await someone who knows how Windows user profiles
work to snswer the real questions:

I want to remove that family name from future cookies. What do I have to do?
If I simply use the User Accounts Control Panel to change the account name
that is displayed, will that change future cookies?

Or, does the username in cookies come from the user directory name?

If it's the latter, from the user directory name, then is the best method
to create a new Windows user profile, and then copy user data from the old
user profile to the new profile as detailed here?:
http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;811151

I read about that method, and another method that involves editing the
registry key "RegisteredOwner" at
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion, so I'm
seeking to know the best method.

And, if I then do copy over the user data from the old user profile to the
new profile, will my applications all work afterwards retaining my prefs,
settings, etc., or will I need to edit any paths anywhere?

franklin-xy wrote:

The filename of each cookie file contains my Windows username in the
section before the "@", e.g. , comes from the
Windows account name. That username is identical for every cookie
produced from my browsing, and as it has my family name I wish to
change it as that information is visible to http traffic. So, I will
await someone who knows how Windows user profiles work to snswer the
real questions:

I want to remove that family name from future cookies. What do I have
to do? If I simply use the User Accounts Control Panel to change the
account name that is displayed, will that change future cookies?

Or, does the username in cookies come from the user directory name?

The filename for a cookie is defined by the web browser and is
typically:



Your *local* web browser is using that naming convention. See:

http://www.brenz.net/cookies/

under "About the Cookie" regarding IE's convention. Javascript can use
HttpCookie.Name to set the name of the cookie *object* to reference it
within the code but the web browser decides what filename to use for
that cookie. Obviously the web browser is a local program that can find
out under what Windows account it is running.

The username is the one assigned to your account, not the name of your
user profile's folder. You can actually change the path to your user
profile folder but the account's username remains the same. To see what
usernames are assigned to each Windows account that you have defined
(assuming you have admin rights), just run "net users" from a DOS
prompt. Or you could run "echo %username%".

To see what is the current path to the user profile folder for the
account under which you are logged under, run "echo %userprofile%".
That does NOT have to use your username as the path for your profile
folder but the default is to do so. That folder is the path to your
profile (of data files/folders). It is NOT your username for your
Windows account.

Your user profile probably has your account's username in its path (but
it may not). The name of your profile folder is NOT your username. Go
read:

http://www.cookiecentral.com/faq/
section 2.10

If you need more help, hopefully someone else joins in that will ignore
your attitude. Bye.

"VanguardLH" wrote:

If you need more help, hopefully someone else joins in that will ignore
your attitude. Bye.

That's the trouble with text-only communications: you cannot see tone or
intent. I intended no attitude. I'm grateful for the insights, thanks.

The filename for a cookie is defined by the web browser and is
typically:



Exactly.

Your *local* web browser is using that naming convention.

Yes, I'm talking about my local web browser running on my PC.

See:

http://www.brenz.net/cookies/

under "About the Cookie" regarding IE's convention. Javascript can use
HttpCookie.Name to set the name of the cookie *object* to reference it
within the code but the web browser decides what filename to use for
that cookie. Obviously the web browser is a local program that can find
out under what Windows account it is running.

The username is the one assigned to your account, not the name of your
user profile's folder.

Okay, that answers one of my main questions, thanks.

You can actually change the path to your user
profile folder but the account's username remains the same.

The reverse is also true. You may easily change the user profile name
(username), and the new one will be displayed and used for login, but the
actual user profile directory will remain unchanged.

To see what
usernames are assigned to each Windows account that you have defined
(assuming you have admin rights), just run "net users" from a DOS
prompt. Or you could run "echo %username%".

To see what is the current path to the user profile folder for the
account under which you are logged under, run "echo %userprofile%".
That does NOT have to use your username as the path for your profile
folder but the default is to do so.

Right, it is the default unless it has been changed. In my case, the default
remains, as I never changed the username nor the user profile directory name.

That folder is the path to your
profile (of data files/folders). It is NOT your username for your
Windows account.

Your user profile probably has your account's username in its path (but
it may not). The name of your profile folder is NOT your username. Go
read:

http://www.cookiecentral.com/faq/
section 2.10

You answered the central question, of where the username portion of the
cookie filename is taken from. Your answer that it comes from the user
profile username makes my job easier, since that is relatively simple to
change. Changing the user profile directory or creating an entirely new
profile and then copying over the data from the old user profile directory
(and making any necessary pathname changes in certain applications and
shortcuts) would have been more work.

Thanks! And, have a good weekend.

franklin-xy wrote:

The filename of each cookie file contains my Windows username in the
section before the "@", e.g. , comes from the
Windows account name. That username is identical for every cookie
produced from my browsing, and as it has my family name I wish to
change it as that information is visible to http traffic. So, I will
await someone who knows how Windows user profiles work to snswer the
real questions:

I want to remove that family name from future cookies. What do I have
to do? If I simply use the User Accounts Control Panel to change the
account name that is displayed, will that change future cookies?

Or, does the username in cookies come from the user directory name?


"VanguardLH" wrote:

the web browser decides what filename to use for
that cookie.



Obviously the web browser is a local program that can find
out under what Windows account it is running.

The username is the one assigned to your account, not the name of your
user profile's folder.


This answer is incorrect.

I changed the Windows user profile username, then rebooted and ensured that
Windows was running under the new username. New cookies were created using
the old username in the filoename, in the usual format of
.

So, does the username in cookies come actually from the user directory
name? If that is the case, then presumably I must make changes such that
Windows will use a different user directory name, either by changing the
current user directory name or by creating a new user profile.


Is the best method to create a new Windows user profile, and then copy user
data from the old user profile to the new profile as detailed here?:
http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;811151

I read about that method, and another method that involves editing the
registry key "RegisteredOwner" at
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion, so I'm
seeking to know the best method.

And, if I then do copy over the user data from the old user profile to the
new profile, will my applications all work afterwards retaining my prefs,
settings, etc., or will I need to edit any paths anywhere?

In ,
franklin-xy typed:
franklin-xy wrote:

The filename of each cookie file contains my Windows
username in the section before the "@", e.g.
, comes from the Windows account name.
That username is identical for every cookie produced from
my browsing, and as it has my family name I wish to change
it as that information is visible to http traffic. So, I
will await someone who knows how Windows user profiles
work to snswer the real questions:

I want to remove that family name from future cookies.
What do I have to do? If I simply use the User Accounts
Control Panel to change the account name that is
displayed, will that change future cookies?

Or, does the username in cookies come from the user
directory name?


"VanguardLH" wrote:

the web browser decides what filename to use for
that cookie.



Obviously the web browser is a local program that can find
out under what Windows account it is running.

The username is the one assigned to your account, not the
name of your user profile's folder.


This answer is incorrect.

I changed the Windows user profile username, then rebooted
and ensured that Windows was running under the new
username. New cookies were created using the old username
in the filoename, in the usual format of
.

So, does the username in cookies come actually from the
user directory name? If that is the case, then presumably
I must make changes such that Windows will use a different
user directory name, either by changing the current
user directory name or by creating a new user profile.


Is the best method to create a new Windows user profile,
and then copy user data from the old user profile to the
new profile as detailed here?:
http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;811151

I read about that method, and another method that involves
editing the registry key "RegisteredOwner" at
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows
NT\CurrentVersion, so I'm seeking to know the best method.

And, if I then do copy over the user data from the old user
profile to the new profile, will my applications all work
afterwards retaining my prefs, settings, etc., or will I
need to edit any paths anywhere?

I've noticed when I'm online with one user account name that's the one used
in the cookies. If I go online using a different account name, that's the
name gets used in the cookies.
As of this thread though, since that was a long time ago, I'm repeating
the tests again. I'm real curious what's changed, but ... it doesn't really
bother me.

HTH,

Twayne`

I don't know how you renamed your account since you didn't describe your
procedure. I'll assume that you went to Control Panel - User Accounts
- Change an Account, selected your account, and clicked on Change Name.

Say your username had been marylamb. If, in a command shell, you had
run the commands:

echo %username%
echo %userprofile%

then they would've displayed:

marylamb
C:\Documents and Settings\marylamb

That's the base folder under which, by default, your shell folders get
created (My Documents, Favorites, Cookies, etc). You can move those
shell folders to other paths, like using TweakUI, but that doesn't
change the definition of what is your userprofile path. When you FIRST
logged into your Windows account, the OS created a userprofile path (and
the shell folders under there) based on what was your username at THAT
time. The username specified the FIRST time you log into an account
gets permanently recorded for that account. You don't even have
userprofile folders until the first time you log into an account. Stuff
gets recorded and created on the first login that you can't change
thereafter.

Say you later renamed your Windows account from marylamb to ednorton.
You were logged in as marylamb and then logged out. You login but now
specify ednorton as your username

By the way: You'll notice that you can still login as marylamb, so you
have 2 names you can use for login: marylamb and ednorton.

You are now logged in as ednorton. Go run the above 2 commands again in
a command shell. What you'll see for output is:

marylamb
C:\Documents and Settings\marylamb

Notice that neither your username or userprofile path changed. Huh?
You just logged on using ednorton but the environment variables still
show you by your old name and your userprofile path hasn't changed.

You changed the name of your Windows account, not its settings. Think
of this like putting name stickers on guests. A guest might grab
another sticker to put over the one he was already wearing. Did the
person change? No, just the writing on the sticker. You are still
logging under the same old account. Changing the name didn't change
what account you used for login. Your username is NOT the same as your
account name. Those are different entities. That in 99.999% of Windows
installations they have the same value has led to everyone thinking they
are the same thing.

Problems might arise from changing the name of your Windows account,
like EFS might not let you decode correctly anymore, but most stuff
should work because everything is defined just like it was before.
Paths didn't change because because you changed the name of your Windows
account. If they did, there would be a very long wait as Windows had to
physically copy all the files to new paths or rename all those paths and
any object that pointed to those old paths to use the new path, like
shortcuts. Apps that used to work would malfunction because the paths
got changed.

If you hunt around the registry looking for instances where your old and
new account names (and your username) are used, you find only a few
places (that aren't part of some config for an app that was stored in
the registry). That's not where the username gets recorded. An account
doesn't exist until the first login for that account. Thereupon a lot
of stuff gets recorded in the SAM (Security Accounts Manager) database.
That includes the SID (security identifier, a very long string) and the
username used when first logging on.

Windows tracks your account by a unique SID (security identifier) in its
SAM (Security Accounts Manager) database. In there is probably where
your username gets stored. That's the username used on the first login
to the account. When you change the name of your account, that doesn't
create a new account. You are still using the same old account with a
new name but Windows still has the same SID assigned in its databse (as
well as registry entries under the HKEY_USERS hive) to that old but
renamed account. That's why when you rename your account there is no
change in the values of %username% and %userprofile% because those comes
out of the SAM database (or possibly from some hashed or encrypted
registry items that are binary so you can't find them using a text
search). You renamed your account but its SID remains the same (it's
still the same old account) and base config settings come out of the SAM
database.

In fact, if you have Windows' taskbar configured to show the account on
which you are logged in (by showing the "Logoff account" entry), you
might've logged on using "ednorton" as the username but you'll notice
the old account name of "marylamb" is shown under the Start menu.
Renaming an account can get a lot of stuff out of sync. So your account
was named marylamb, you renamed it to ednorton, but the logoff menu
still shows marylamb as well as the environment variables that are
defined by the OS out of values recorded for the account in the SAM
database.

Now you have a clue why renaming your account had no effect on what
Internet Explorer used to name a cookie. It uses the account name that
was originally stored on first login for the SID of the account under
which you logged in. Rather than say IE uses:



for a cookie name, probably better would be to say:



For the vast majority of Windows installations, account name and
username are the same to the first form is usually the syntax cited on
how IE forms filenames for cookies.

So IE is using your USERname, the one that was originally used to define
that same old account that you renamed. Renaming the account changes
the login credentials (i.e., the username specified there) but not the
username by which the account was first referenced or recorded.


Coming all the way back to your original inquiry (and now that you know
the username will remain fixed for an account no matter what account
name you give it) ...

The username that IE prefixes onto the filename for a cookie
) is NOT sent anywhere when the site asks the
web browser to divulge the *content* of that site's cookie that it
previously deposited on your host. Your username is NOT seen in the
data sent to the site. The site can only see what is *inside* the
cookie (a .txt file), not what it is named.

As I recall from reading some Javascripts, it is possible for a web site
via script in the web page delivered to your host to specify the domain
portion of the filename that the web browser uses when creating the
file. The web browser determines the username portion, the javascript
can determine the domain portion, the web browser decides the filetype
(of .txt) so you get - but the site doesn't get
to define nor discover the username portion.

franklin wrote:

Is the best method to create a new Windows user profile, and then copy user
data from the old user profile to the new profile as detailed here?:
http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;811151

I read about that method, and another method that involves editing the
registry key "RegisteredOwner" at
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion, so I'm
seeking to know the best method.

And, if I then do copy over the user data from the old user profile to the
new profile, will my applications all work afterwards retaining my prefs,
settings, etc., or will I need to edit any paths anywhere?

Best is to start a whole new discussion asking on how to migrate on
account profile to another [new] account profile rather than having it
get buried in this discussion. That's a whole other monster.

While Microsoft has their standard means of defining profiles and how to
migrate one to the other, there is actually a means of defining multiple
accounts to point at the SAME profile. So you could regularly login
under your own "franklin" admin-level account and make changes to it,
like rearrange the Start menu, put shortcuts on the desktop, and so on.
If the "Administrator" and "franklin" accounts were defined to point at
the same profile, you could then logon under the Administrator account
and magically see it presented with all the changes you already made to
your franklin account. So instead of duplicating the profiles and
copying them to another profile (one account, one profile), you can
setup Windows to have multiple accounts point at the same profile (many
accounts, one shared profile). This gets very tricky, usually works
well if done right, but can lead into some nasty problems later so I
quit doing that a long time ago.

See my other reply as to why your username and accountname have
different values (but username still has the original value and still
gets used for cookie filenames).

I you don't like the username that got recorded for your account (and
will continue to get used for you account despite changing the
accountname value), you'll have to create a new account and copy your
profile from the old account to the new account. To do the copying
requires a 3rd account (admin level) so that none of the files are
locked for either the source or target accounts. So start a new thread
if you want to discuss how to copy a profile from an old to new account.

RegisteredOwner has nothing to do with either the username or
accountname values. That's what you specified when you installed
Windows. It is rarely the same value as your username (or accountname).
You might create an account on the install of Windows that was called
JesusChrist but register it under the name of Lucifer. Your username
remains JesusChrist even if you change the registeredOwner to Amadeus.
As noted in my other reply, renaming the *account* from JesusChrist to
GodDamnIt still has JesusChrist as the username for that same account.