We value your privacy so much that we keep absolutely no trace of your passage on this site.
There is only one cookie that is set on your computer from this site and it contains a salted one-way hash based on the IP address you used when you first downloaded a file from us. There is no way to derive identifying information from it. It is used to hide the "Rules of Courtesy" interstitial you see the first time you download a file.
It's similar to the private key/public key authentication method, where your IP is the public key and the salt used to encrypt it is the private key. It serves as anonymous login and its maximum life time is 6 months.
There are ads on this site as you may have noticed. They are provided by a company called ValueClick Media, who seem like a decent bunch. They are part of the Network Advertising Initiative, which is a group which takes your privacy very seriously
As per their terms of service, I am required to include this bit in my privacy policy:
We use third-party advertising companies to serve ads when you visit our Website. These companies may use information (which does not including your name, address email address or telephone number) about your visits to this and other Web sites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services of interest to you. If you would like more information about this practice and to know your choices about not having this information used by these companies, click here.
We allow third-party companies to serve ads and/or collect certain anonymous information when you visit our web site. These companies may use non-personally identifiable information (e.g., click stream information, browser type, time and date, subject of advertisements clicked or scrolled over) during your visits to this and other Web sites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services likely to be of greater interest to you. These companies typically use a cookie or third party web beacon to collect this information. To learn more about this behavioral advertising practice or to opt-out of this type of advertising, you can visit http://www.networkadvertising.org.
We partner with ValueClick to serve ads and/or collect certain information when you visit our website. ValueClick may use cookies or web beacons to collect non-personally identifiable information during your visit to this website in order to help show advertisements on other websites likely to be more interesting to you. To learn more about this “behavioral advertising” practice or to opt-out of this use of your anonymous information, you can visit http://valueclickmedia.com/webuser_privacy.shtml.
Basically, the Behavioral Advertising can be disabled by visiting http://www.networkadvertising.org/managing/opt_out.asp.