What is meta? ×  stackoverflow's user cookie seems to have the
form   (the times are sans year, which is a little strange).  I
assume the mystery values are some kind of hash or session id,
but why are there two of them?  share|improve this question Oh
come on! Where's the fun in reverse engineering if you ask! =P
–  Tom Ritter Aug 4 '09 at 12:06 @Tom Ritter: right, what was I
thinking! Good thing nobody who knows answered. –  ysth Aug 5
'09 at 3:00  2 Answers 2  up vote 2 down vote accepted  Ah,
after googling muchly, I think these may be series and token
identifiers, as described in http://jaspan.com/improved_persiste
nt_login_cookie_best_practice.  Each is a base64-encoded 128-bit
(presumably random) number, with the trailing == removed.
share|improve this answer My guess that s stand for secret. (the
series id for uses is the user id). –  Fitzchak Yitzchaki May 21
'10 at 23:07 @Mendy: I don't think so; the whole point of having
a distinct series token is that it is secret, preventing a
would-be DOS attack