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Netscape 6 is Spyware?
spoon00 writes: "AOL is collecting information on what Netscape 6 users are searching for on sites like google.com. IP address, the date Netscape was installed and a unique ID number are other bits of information AOL is also collecting."
Really once aol took over is this any real surprise?
We can't get any privacy around here at all. Every program we run has some kind of SPY thing with it.
I hope this doesn't come as a surprise to anyone. Sell something to AOL and say goodbye to privacy. I just hope it does not effect any Mozilla releases.
Don't Tread on Me
It seems to me everytime we see this stuff, the spyware is generally nested in something intended to make your life easier. Password storers, quick search buttons, etc. Yes, we complain about it every time.
But maybe we should keep this in mind, and look at those type programs to find the real offenders.
We don't need no Net Explorer We don't need no Thought control
...But this is a non-issue. According to the article it only affects those that type it into the search bar...
...Which I don't use because google is my homepage...
/ex
... that this is an overblown response over a mistake, thinking that the crash reports might be sending spyware-like data - e.g. which windows are open right now and their URIs, etc? And, umm, the IPs would be part of that TCP/IP connection.
Well, it's worth considering. But then, I use Mozilla nightlies, so I'm submitting pretty often...
James F.
You're getting a product for free. If netscape needs information to sell/share to it's partners so it can get more revenue and keep producing great products, that's fine. You don't have to use their browser. A more interesting question is that did you agree to it in the EULA?
there are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots
I mean how many people actually use NS6?
Anytime a Navigator user performs a search by typing terms into the browser's URL bar and pressing the adjacent Search button, or by using the Search tab on the browser's My Sidebar feature
And out of those that do, how many use the URL bar to search?
Personally, I don't give a rip, 'cos I don't use NS and never will...
--
Some weasel took the cork out of my lunch.
Now it's time to skew their numbers, .. I think I'm going to have to do about 14million automated searches for "CROSSDRESSING MONKEY PORNO" using their search bar..
Don't use it. Uninstall NS6 and use Mozilla instead. Same browser - without the unnecessary extra crud AOL bundles into it anyhow.
Netscape gives you the browser for free.
Netscape pays dozens of engineers to keep improving the browser and gives you the source code. (You can count on one hand the number of Mozilla developers who don't get an AOL paycheck).
And you're bitching about AOL collecting some lousy anonymized demographics???
If you don't like it, write your own damn browser. And stop making companies that contribute to the Open Source movement feel like they're wasting their time.
When will we all finally be so fed up at the consistent invasions of our privacy by media moguls like Real networks, AOL, Netscape (yeah one and the ame..)? We neeed to contact our legislators and demand these practices stop. Maybe if anonymous data was gathered, but to tie it with an IP address really goes beyond any justifiable data collection.
'mmmmmmmmm.... forbidden donut'
This is ridiculous...how can they have set this up without knowing that a) it would be discovered and b) it was thoroughly and completely Orwellian?
:)
I think that we should all write letters of protest...into the Google search field.
Spyware is in your cereal! Who cares. You get what you pay for. If you want something better build it yourself.
You guessed it...... CowboyNeal
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
The article makes no reference to Netscape 6's derivation from Mozilla. I would imagine that this practice isn't being done in Mozilla, but I wonder if the mozilla project had anything to do with making this possible, or if Netscape just did it all on their own. I'm leaning towards the latter.
This sure makes me glad that MS products never "phone home". E.T.^H^H^H^H N.N. phone home.
"Navigator users can avoid having Netscape log their searches by directly accessing a third-party search engine by typing its address into the browser rather than using the Search button or Sidebar."
Of course, this doesn't change the privacy issue.
** The opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect those of my employers - past, present, or future**
According to IE 6/XP's "Search Companion", this feature "provides task suggestions and automatically sends your search to other search engines."
How does this occur if it doesn't transmit the information to Microsoft as well?
Sure, if I add a search engine into the preferences, I can type "google keyword" all I want to go directly to Google. I suspect, though, that if I rely on the "features" that Microsoft provides, they have access to exactly the same information-- regardless of what the article might claim.
The most searched topics are adult oriented.
Basically, everyone is usually searching for porn.
Wish I had a link to some of the studies. Does anyone have any links to back me up?
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
If these companies really think that everyone is stupid and will never figure it out.
I mean, sure, if you're running AOL there's a pretty good chance you're not exactly the sharpest tool in the shed. But to design software, which grabs so much information and sends it to central servers, and think that no one out there will figure it out, it seems to me they are the ones a few french fries short of a happy meal(tm).
---
I'm a few morsels short of a toll-house cookie myself...
I was just thinking, I need more spyware on my PC. A browser is a great idea. Why doesn't AOL just surf for me. Put out an automated browser, and the sites just come up randomly. That way, I don't have to decide what sites I want to pull up. At every site that comes up, they ask you for Name, Address, Zip Code, Date of Birth, Mother's Maiden Name, SSN, Credit Card number, shoe size, and sexual preference.
I can't wait.
-------------------------------------------
Saving baby carrots around the globe.
pico /etc/hosts
127.0.0.1 www.netscape.com
Knowledge is like ignorance.. too much can be just as bad as not enough.
is that AOL will have logs of all 5 Netscape users.... they aren't marketing genius's for nuthin!!!!
Was the spyware feature somthing that was bolted on AFTER the code was built up from its 'Mozilla' state? If not, how come somthing like this wasnt noticed in the source code sooner.
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
Anytime some piece of software is spying... I should be informed during the install of this. I have a right to know who's watching me do what from my own home. How this would be enforced is beyond me, but I have the right to know.
"The best laid plans of mice and men gang oft agley..." - ROBERT BURNS
It's better than Netscape 6 (more up to date rendering engine and surrisingly stable considering it's still in beta) and there's no chance of any nasty behaviour on the behalf of the developers thanks to its open source nature.
Netscape needs to collect information about the frequency of searches in order to bill the search engines correctly. The very fact that it only occurs in the "Search bar" shows that they are very likely to be telling the truth. It wouldn't be hard to log much much more data than they apparently do.
The commment about the ip address was misleading as well. Any time that information is sent to my computer, I can log the IP address. It doesn't mean that I am going to be doing anything with it.
Ceci n'est pas un post
I had that exact signature up for about an hour the other night on my +5 post. Tee hee.
-- SlashChick
It shouldn't be tolerated. People shouldn't be informed they are being spied on and say, "Eh, I figured as much anyway." Would you say that if you found that the CIA had been wiretapping your phone line and/or DSL/Cable line for the past 6 months? /. headline, "MS-AOL using tiny dust-sized robot probes that ship with Windows 3K that get into your nostrils, sit behind your eyes and monitor everything you do." *shutter*
I haven't read the licence agreement to Netscape 6 recently, but I don't care if it says anything about monitoring your browsing trends (it's hard to call them 'habits' due to the very definition of the word). It almost appears as people are becoming complacient about this. If you get used to it, they will just push further once they have their hand in your privacy and you don't flinch. Eventually, it may come down to a
Once more a large company is stepping on your rights and your privacy, and while maybe you shouldn't be suprised, you should be outraged.
Please?
Pretty please?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Just another reason to use Konqueror and an Open Source / Free OS.
/. bigotry, stick to the subject.
Yeah, cause Open Source / Free OS really matters here.
Come on, if you are gonna spout off the usual
Mozilla and Konqeror, yes... but free OS?
Netscape on Linux (note, linux is an Open Source / Free OS) still gets tracked.
I'm speechless, I just don't know what to say. I know this isn't new or anything, but I still can't believe it! I never thought that Netscape would stoop so low. (I realize that it's not necessarily the Netscape Developer Team's fault, but still...). Has AOL no shame?
"No manual entry for woman."
(disclaimers vs. kneejerk replies: a) Note very carefully that I said CSS2. Konq's CSS1 support is excellent. b) I haven't played with any KDE 3 betas. I hear it's improved a bit. The point still remains, though, that at current Konq's CSS2 support is substandard.)
--
viqsi - See "vixen"
If we do not change our direction we are likely to end up where we are headed.
Netscape's "smart browsing" sends the addresses of sites you visit to them.s ing/
http://www.netscape.com/escapes/smart_brow
Big whoop. Like he said in the article, it is used for billing the search engines who pay for inclusion. If you don't like it, just write your own sidebar, it is quite simple to do so. Look at a simple dict.org sidebar I wrote.
Netscape 6 is Spyware?
Oddly, it's also utter dogshit. Congratulations, Netscape, you're finally catching up with Microsoft!
--saint
I just did a bit of digging around in Mozilla and it definately does *NOT* use the search button in the same way as Netscape 6. So it appears that us Mozilla users are not affected. :)
opera mozilla
Please talk to me
behavior and information is something a product should clearly and regularly identify it is doing to the customer. Customers are generally willing to cooperate when they perceive there is value to the free product/service they are getting-- but only if they understand exactly what is being recorded, when, and how.
Having to worry about software doing stuff behind your back without informing you is exactly the reason why I go to great lengths to avoid using Windows Media and why I don't use a number of current gnutella clients.
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
Am I the only one who doesn't see this as an issue? The unique ID number is a bit much, but the url forwarding system?
Don't get me wrong, I dispise AOL/TW and I haven't used Netscape since version 5 because I don't like the way it works - (Shoot me - I like IE) but I just don't see what the big deal of using a url forward is. If you can, according to the article, disable it by typing "http://www.google.com" directly into the address bar, whats the deal?
quis custodiet ipsos custodes - Juvenal
We're talking AOL here. Did you expect a big sloppy kiss?
In journalism schools, getting a name wrong earns you an automatic failure. Apparently Newsbytes doesn't hold its reporters to such a high standard.
Who here has been locked in jail or harassed or abused by AOL or the authorities because of what they typed into their netscape 6 search bar? Hm, nobody? Okay, nothing to see here. Move along. - A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
I wonder if winamp is collecting stats on what I'm listening to? Although i dont see this as a reason to use an "open source/free OS", since this has nothing to do with the operating system.
I think that finding out what people are searching for is ok, but also registering their IP address goes a little too far. But then again, this is only for people who do use the search bar, and they probably don't care as much. I, for one, don't use Netscape in favor of MSIE, but my homepage is /. and I search from the Google! menubar on /.'s homepage, so no matter what browser I use they wouldn't be able to get it.
True, but the only problem with that argument is that bundled Netscape isnt a great product. Perhaps if Netscape still rocked we could cut them some slack...
You can't please all the people all the time, but you sure can piss all of them off all the time.......
You wouldn't happen to have a link to the NS 6.2.1 source code would you? There isn't one.
... Mozilla is.
Netscape 6 is definately NOT OSS
you agreed to it
...when you consider that the parent isn't just AOL, but AOL/TW.
Dear sources, please stop giving us reasons to use Netscape, we already know it's a horrible browser with rapidly declining market share. Adding insult to injury is almost .. sad.
Please subscribe to see the more insightful version of th
Hello, mod the parent down, please. Netscape 6 is not open source, it is closed source ona all platforms. If it was open I could recompile it and get rid of the "feature". The paren post is extremely ignorant
Therefore, the temporary workaround would be to set info.netscape.com to 127.0.0.1 in your /etc/hosts (or c:\windows\hosts or whatever).
The solution is to use Mozilla and remove Netscape 6.
Will that do anything? Mozilla has the same search button as Netscape 6.
So the question can become: Does clicking the "Search" button in Mozilla send data to Netscape, Inc?
And what does Google have to say about this? After all, they are the recipients of the data.
"We just keep track of aggregate numbers and don't monitor any terms or anything. We
just need to know how many people are searching via our browser to our search partners,
and that's all the information we receive,"
Well, you can now count me: users = users - 1;
I am going to type "AOL sucks" a thousand times in the search engine. Spy on that!
When we bought our computer one of the "features" we noticed several months down the road was that a seldom used folder named "wt" at the very bottom of the Windows directory was consistently phoning home every time we connected to the internet. I went into control panel and disabled it from there but the next time I restarted it was enabled again. I disabled it again and then set the interval between wakeups for this particular "updater" to the max which was 2880. It was still trying to phone home even with all that but couldn't because of my firewall. Finally I went into one of its files and changed 2002 to 2012. It finally stopped trying to access the internet (as far as I know). Why hasn't anyone looked into Wild Tangent? In a text file titled _privacy, they mention that they use the updater so that the latest drivers can be used. But they also mention that this is not a contract or legally binding in any way! Here's a portion of the privacy file:
Lastly we track information about how WildTangent content is used.
This allows us to bill publishers that are using our technology for
commercial applications. This billing mechanism also makes it
possible for us to make the technology available to a large community
of small content developers for free, while generating revenue from
the larger folks who use our technology to make money. We don't know
who you are, nor do we try to figure it out unless you want to tell
us.
It seems to me that if they're collecting money (generating revenue) from the information they gather using the updater, then that means they're selling it. To whom? When did I give my consent? I never installed the software, it came with the computer. End users are losing more rights every day and the internet is becoming sadder and more business oriented everyday.
Dammit your karma whoring is disgusting! STOP IT!
Have they released any of the collected information about what Netscape 6 users are searching for on Google?
I thought that recently Google released a top 10 list of search patterns (5ex, Britney, MP3, etc.) but I was wondering if Netscape 6 users were any different from the net users at large.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
As of the first search and watch of Mozilla I have ever done tonight gave up the same results as NS6.
So the Article should be titled:
"NS6 and Mozilla are spyware!!!"
In a recent bugtraq post, someone mentioned IE also does similar things. If you type a wrong URL and cannot be resolved by the DNS. Your typed address will be sent to MSN for suggesting new URL. If MS logs all these requests, Similar results....
I have been using Netscape as my browser ever since I've been online but This is just another of my many disappointments with Netscape 6, which prompted my move to Konqueror and Mozilla. My first complaint is its bloat then its Allergic reactions to java and now this. Maybe I was wrong about AOL as Netscape has changed for the worse. It's a good thing we have Mozilla.
Google doesn't have anything to do with the methods used by the browsers. They get exactly what they would get through any other browser.
It just happens that Netscape basically forwards the same request to Netscape too.
This is one program where I feel I have to pay the registration fee, just to support them.
You know who I think is crazy? All my ex-girlfriends!
It's better than Netscape 6
That's not saying much :)
In case of fire, do not use elevator. Use water!
makes you wonder what changes they've made to ICQ since they've taken over that operation?
"Life is short, Life is shit, and soon it will be over..." -kith
I disagree with you. Unlike most of the general user population, I *PURCHASED* my Netscape CD for the sake of supporting development, and having a real hard copy around. It's quite a useful CD, which includes Netscape for Linux, Windows, and Mac. So to find out that software I purchased has major undocumented features which are a REAL threat to my privacy, I am apalled. Software producers should be required to place a warning on any software which will compromise your privacy or transmit personal information.
Check the source yourself... (no, it doesn't)
I'm a concientious
I find it very ironic that a story mere weeks ago about Microsoft spyware had such a negative bent, while it's okay for Netscape. Hypocrites.
Netscape 6 is PEOPLE!
At least it doesn't keep a detailed record of your uploads/downloads and directory structure. Some people claim Windows XP xfers that information to home base.
Spooooky....
This pops up in IE for just a split second when you mistype a hostname or for some other reason it cannot be resolved.
u nk nownhost.someunknowndomain.com&srch=3&prov=&utf8
http://auto.search.msn.com/response.asp?MT=some
From which they can get all the connection request information and headers, as well as use pattern matching and best guess techniques to determine what people are searching for.
But it seems even sleazier for AOL to directly collect info from successful searches as well as from failed ones.
Thank god the first thing I do when installing a new version of Netscape is turn off that EXTREMELY ANNOYING "SmartBrowsing" thing they call a "feature". I know where I'm going; the most I expect the URL location bar to do is prefix and postfix what i type in with "www." and ".com". I know when I want to do a search on a term, and when I do, I go to google.
The next thing to go is the Sidebar. The last thing I want is some idiotic piece of software giving me "hints" to what it thinks I was thinking.
Netscape sucks. Sorry. Mozilla is marginally better but I think they've gone too far with options... there's an option for every 'action' that you can perform on the internet. otherwise it's pretty decent. I use galeon/knoqueror depending on if i feel like using sawfish or kde for that day. today i couldn't decide so i'm using galeon from KDE. to me, netscape is a non-player now. But thanks for the source code. Otherwise galeon wouldn't have been possible (uses mozilla i believe.)
On IRC and in a few news threads hosted for Mozilla... they are doing the same and it has been in there for a while. How do you think they can make money??? And better, I love how the most ardent MS bashers are now himmin and hawwin about NS not being the giant evil, even though only a few weeks ago MS got bashed by the same people for doing the same thing.
Life Sucks... Have a Beer and a Smoke then Smile Damnit!!!
While this argument does tend to be extremely one-sided at times on good ol' Slashdot, your implication that it should be a non-issue to people is preposterous.
What you're basically saying is that AOL can do anything it wants with their browser, and anyone who thinks otherwise should either
A. Stuff it
B. Write a browser
While just about anyone could choose (A), I believe you have greatly overestimated/exaggerated the amount of people who are capable of (B). Perhaps there are quite a few on Slashdot; certainly there would be a greater concentration of such people here than in the average American suburb; however, reacting to every argument over the ethics of data gathering in application software with "WRITE IT YUORSLEF!!!!!" might not be the most intelligent way to join the discussion. No one is going to listen to you in a debate if you act as if there is no debate and your point is totally obvious. Not everyone can write a browser; and most people are just going to use what's on their computer when they buy it. Arguing that spying on people who don't know any better and have no way to protect themselves *might* just be a little shady certainly is valid and does not warrant your instant dismissal.
no one has mentioned the fact that aol later this year will be using netscape as the browser for AOL, then this search issue will have some relevance, as their are 1 million plus AOL users...
IE 5 rules!
I'd be more worried about the impact on search speed from the redirects than about the fact that Netscape sees the search terms. Either way, I prefer Opera's strategy of adding "&sourceid=opera" to searches from the search box in the browser's toolbar. Given Google's reputation, Netscape shouldn't have any trouble letting Google count for them.
The shareholder is always right.
Turn on a fire wall or packet sniffer along with a thread process monitor and watch what goes out to www6.winamp.org/cgi-bin/sc2a.pl I haven't had time to do much more than this, and I noticed that sometimes is is www2.winamp.org/cgi-bin/sc2a.pl. Makes you wonder what is being reported, but I find no report cache files so what ever it is happening on the flyin the main exe file.
Life Sucks... Have a Beer and a Smoke then Smile Damnit!!!
Remember, Netscape Engineers Are Weenies, and won't have the guts to actually abuse this info.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
This is a dumb article.
Netscape uses sherlock to do it's searches. By default it's setup to go through netscapes page. All you have to do is install the sherlock plugin for the search engine you want to use and it no longer sends information back to netscape.
Pick your search engine:
http://mycroft.mozdev.org/
Sure it does, read the next response to the parents parent.
You can turn it off, but it is on by default.
XP certainly DOES phone home. Just watch the packets going out your ethernet interface every time you start it up.
Hmmm... didn't alot of moderates and non-commital people in Germany say that during the early and mid 1930's? Didn't alot of people say that there was no point to voting just before and during the Reign of Terror that was the Clinton administration??? I bet you similar words flowed from the mouths of Southern Italians just before Musolini took power too. Just because today a company or government does nothing does not mean that their newly acquired data cannot be used in the future in a way that is negative towards you. You have posted what has to be the most stupid thing yet I have seen on /. in the years I have been here... contratulations.
Life Sucks... Have a Beer and a Smoke then Smile Damnit!!!
Is this writeup not the most poorly written ever seen on Slashdot?
Is Michael having some issues today?
First, type http://info.netscape.com into URL bar, abd get forwarded to http://home.netscape.com.
Then, edit C:\Winnt\System32\drivers\etc\hosts and add:
127.0.0.1 info.netscape.com
Close and reopen Mozilla and try http://info.netscape.com and get Connection refused (unless you run a local web server, of course) to prove that info.netscape.com is no longer accessible.
Now, try a keyword search from the URL bar, which for me goes straight to google.com without a hitch.
I am not your blowing wind, I am the lightning.
maybe I should download N6 and search for 'AOL sucks' 20 times a day.
Just a push over the table before they shoved it up my ass. Thanks to years of lovely liberal trash in power, we are now down to this; companies feel they can do what they want and it will take YEARS before anyone actually acts, which by that point it's too late.
Life Sucks... Have a Beer and a Smoke then Smile Damnit!!!
Oh well, just more reasons to use Internet Explorer 6 or Mozilla.
NS6 is the crippled, downgraded Mozilla anyways. Why do poeple bother?
To all you suggesting Mozzilla instead... help me with this. Where do you send a user on the mozilla.org site to download the browser? For every other browser, they make it crystal clear where to click to download.(Look at the front page of Opera. There's a simple Try Opera in large type. There's also a Free Download on the nav bar.) Mozilla does not have something like this. I couldn't figure out where to click and don't many other not so technically savvy people can either. So call me stupid if you want. No matter, just tell me where to click. The site is unituitive but I'd still like to try the browser.
How about some empircal evidence there bub!!!??? I am always on, running an external firewall. Never had a hint of any traffic going out like this at any time. Haven't read anything about it happening during autoupdate either (there was a great article on The Register two months ago to dispell that myth). Stop being a rabid dog *nix flag waving nazi and back your bald ass statements with some fact.
Life Sucks... Have a Beer and a Smoke then Smile Damnit!!!
Many (perhaps most) of the users of Netscape also use its POP mail feature to download their mail from their ISP. If Netscape has your e-mail address, and tracks your browsing/searching habits, well, let's see.....
...
Address List + Targeted marketing =
Well, i think you all see where I'm going with this.
Netscape 6.X hasn't really impressed me all that much, I have to admit,and I don't think this new Spyware scandal will do them any good, although knowing the media, it is most likely blown out of proportion anyway.
Unfortunately, the browser market seems to be in a bit of a slump... IE is also not a perfect browser, but unfortunately I find it the lesser of two evils at this point. There is a hack that I have devised for avoiding URL post reversing to sites that the URL search requests did not originate from, and also set the Search Provider in the Windows Registry, thus avoiding two pitfalls with one peice of code.
return S_OK;}
I reviewed some of the Mozilla project's source code, and I was quite disgusted by what I found. The threading implementation (or lack thereof, or replacement therefore) is ill-designed and most users will find the browser unusable after more than 20 windows are opened. I don't really understand why the Mozilla developers haven't looked into this and fixed the problem. I would sumbit patches myself, but I am too busy with several new projects at J-J-J-Julius, including "Star Trek: Return to Phylos" as well as the next-generation game engine that Cinemaware has contracted my company to write for them to aid their revival in the game market.
cheers,
Steven WostoenLead Programmer,
J-j-j-julius Games
So long as it's not the big bad doing the sneaky-sneaky, then there's probably room for discussion. Netscape LOST the browser wars, and just like every other dot-com pos they're trying to make bank off of selling YOUR INFO. Fuck that it's anonymous. It's still demographics they shouldn't have!!!! Sad state of affairs where the losers get desperate INSTEAD OF INNOVATIVE.
It seems to me that it might just be that AOL/Netscape sends the search info "home" to make sure the search is correct. This way if Google (or any of the other possible search engines) decides to change how searches work, then you browser doesn't break.
Also, all we know is what is sent, not what AOL collects.
And finally, the search in Netscape is NOT sending the IP address of your computer, this is how HTTP connections work. The packet's origin is always included. Netscape 6 is also sending your IP address to every site you visit. As is IE, Opera, Mozilla, etc.
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. -- William James
It makes sense to send searches through a netscape.com redirector. Suppose they sent search requests directly to google.com, and 6 months from now google.com disappeared. That leaves all of the people using their browsers with a broken search function.
This just lets them choose a different search engine in the event that their current search engine disappears off the face of the planet, or they device to switch to a newer, better search engine.
Nothing to see here people, move along...
I use Mozilla myself, but it's quite trivial to modify NS6 so that it won't report your searches to AOL/Netscape.
- Both Mozilla and Netscape use ${MOZHOME}/searchplugins/
- The 'searchplugins' folder has plaintext files and gif images.
- Mozilla uses 'google.src' and Netscape uses 'SBWeb_02.src' for Google searches.
This entire problem can be solved by opening said file in a plain text editor and removing the 'http://info.netscape.com/fwd/lksidus_gg/' prefix (for NS6 only. Mozilla doesn't have the prefix).
Ditto for all of the other *.src files with NS6.
Of course, the SIMPLE answer is to just go to the freaking site and use their "search" button, not depend on the button on the Netscape GUI, but I guess that's too obvious...
Your Servant, B. Baggins
Are you high? Dude, you need some rehab before you post any more gibberish. Fsck74rd!
The juxtaposition of "Netscape 6 is Spyware" immediately below this banner ad was amusing. I wonder if AOL realizes how this probably would not entice a /.er to download the latest/greatest Netscape dev tools?
(Apologies to George Carlin for the subject line.)
Google could do exactly the same thing as AOL on the server side. What's the difference? We "like" google but "hate" AOL/Netscape. This week. But it doesn't really matter right? Google could get bought by AOL next week and then where are you?
Just get Mozilla anyway... why anyone would use Netscape rather than Mozilla (oh wait, there's all those facinating "free" offers from AOL...) is beyond me.
I am not a number! I am a man! And don't you
SiSoft's Sandra benchmarking ANNOUNCES that its free and says it installs SPYWARE. At least they are honest and tell users. Why cant others? Why must they install behind ur back by deception?
I trust software that is honest up front.
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
winnt/2k/xp:
notepad \winnt\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
win9x/me:
notepad \windows\hosts
and add the line
206.224.72.99 info.netscape.com
or use 127.0.0.1 instead if you have a webserver.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
I am posting this from konq-y right now and your are correct... weak on standards.... I still can't get simple javascript elements to work properly either... but, let 'em (kde guys) know so they can focus on it... still, there is opera...
Record of all activity and communication through the use of
All content created or transmitted
The ability to remove bookmarks to links of our choosing
Unused CPU capacity
Unused fixed storage capacity
The ability to on-the-fly derogatory references to the software provider at any point
The ability to enter your dwelling and verify all software and content stored on fixed media is legal and that no decryption, nor software for the breaking of copy protection or reverse engineering of such exists
All your base
Signify your acceptance of these terms by remaining silent and clicking Here [] like a good sheep.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
that use netscape. Works like a charm.
I understand that people have concerns about their patterns being watched or 'spied on', but I'm really curious about what their reasoning is.
Let's say hypothetically that Netscape was logging every single website you go to or posts you make at a forum etc, what's the worst case scenario of they could do with that information? I'm asking because I'm genuinely curious, not because I'm saying it's not a big deal. I just want to understand the privacy point of view.
Personally, I'm not bothered by it. The reason that I'm not worried about it is that if they're doing it to me, they're doing it to everybody. Seems like there's safety in numbers. The only useful data they could mine out if it is statistics. I don't mind being a statstic in this case.
Could somebody explain to me what's missing in my perspective?
"Derp de derp."
http://info.netscape.com/fwd/lksidus_gg/http://www .google.com/search?hl=en&q=aol+sucks
When searching in Mozilla, your search request only gets sent to Netscape this way if you actually search using the Netscape search (why they then still do this is beyond me, but okay... 's probably to simply have all the data in one place or something... whatever)
: //search.netscape.com/search.psp"
From the NetscapeSearch.src in your mozilla/searchplugins dir:
<SEARCH
name="Netscape Search"
description = "Netscape Search"
method="GET"
action="http://info.netscape.com/fwd/sidb_ns/http
queryCharset="UTF-8"
>
and from Google.src:
<search
name="Google"
description="Google Search"
method="GET"
action="http://www.google.com/search"
update="http://www.google.com/mozilla/google.src"
updateCheckDays=1
>
I never bothered to get Netscape 6, but I assume these files exist in there as well. It's plain text, so simply remove the http://info.netscape.com/fwd/sidb_ns/ part from the action of the searches and the problem should be fixed.
But the yellow on your home page burnt my retinas & now I am blind.
Mozilla and Netscape may seem identical, but they are very different:
Even though it was started by Netscape, and Netscape employees make up a significant portion of its developers, mozilla.org is the independent and nonprofit organization to oversee the open source development of the Mozilla browser and its related technologies. mozilla.org's products are free for any company, organization, or individual, to use. They are free to create their own branded products based on mozilla.org's goods. mozilla.org's products are all open source and are meant for developers and testers, not the average computer user.
Also keep in mind that mozilla.org recieves contributions from such large corporations such as IBM and Sun Microsystems, and countless small firms and volunteers.
Netscape Communications is a commercial company, and they make commercial products for regular computer users and businesses.
This is where the distinction between Mozilla and Netscape seems to blur to some people:
In order for Netscape to make Netscape 6 they have to use mozilla.org's work. This involves getting that code from mozilla.org, adding modifications and non-open source parts such as plug-ins, branding it with the appropriate logos and copyrights, testing and stabilizing it, and then release it for download. In other words, Netscape 6 is based on Mozilla, but Netscape 6 is not Mozilla, and Mozilla is not Netscape 6.
This method is similar to how Linux distributors, such as Red Hat, make their own branded and commercial releases of Linux, since Red Hat is not Linux, and Linux is not Red Hat. Red Hat merely uses Linux, and Linux developers have no control over what Red Hat does.
The nature of Mozilla and mozilla.org also allows anyone to create a product based on Mozilla. For example, Nokia and Intel demonstrated prototype Internet appliances in late-1999 using Mozilla. Because of Mozilla's modularity, a scaled down version of Mozilla was the browser used in these test products.
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
It seems like they do this via a re-direct, so they need the search terms. So certainly they are in a position to collect them if they want, but that's somewhat different than saying the are collecting them.
Glad I use mozilla and not Netscape though.
I'm pretty sick of people whose knee-jerk reaction to all things tech is, "Whatever isn't Microsoft." Particularly since AOL bought Netscape and the AOL/Time Warner merger. People still keep defending Netscape even when that piece of crap 6.0 was released. Even when 4.7 didn't fully support CSS standards. And now that AOL is spying on them, they still say "Hooray! It's not M$!" Wake up people! Spyware is spyware!
Ya Sure! You Betcha!, The_THOMAS
Whenever I am forced to use an IE on yet another corporate PC I get, I always go to the Tools/Internet Options/Advanced, and change some things to suit my taste on presentation and security (to the extent you can get the latter with IE...)
security/more anonymous browsing
DISABLE Install On Demand
DISABLE Page Hit Counting
DISABLE Page Transitions
presentation
DON'T Show Friendly HTTP messages
(I want the plain servers response back, unedited, dammit!)
DON'T Show Friendly URLs
DON'T Use Smooth Scrolling (smooth scrolling makes my eyes SORE!!!)
Search From Address Toolbar:
DON'T Search From Address Toolbar
(This is the one that completely toggles the autosearch off.)
Security:
turn all the certificate checks and alerts on
also I use the "High" security zone settings for casual browsing
VKh
Yeah. UI is about it. My preference for Konqueror vs Mozilla has a lot to do with the nice antialiased fonts.
Every time a new finding like this comes about everybody screams bloody murder. But who really cares? Netscape/Aol/Whatever else is not going to attack you because you looked at porn, or how to make bombs, or how to eat children. If their numbers allow them to set up better searching parameters, then let them know all about me.
-- Henry
My reference of "Open Source / Free OS" had more to do with spyware in general then with Netscape. Take Microsoft's Windows Media Player for example.
The netscape search bar is meant to perform a search first of the netscape homepage IIRC, and then if relavant results aren't found, another search engine is chained.
How often the second link of the searching chain is invoked is pretty critical in netscape figuring out how effective their search engine is.
For those that remember the old Yahoo days when it used Altavista as a backup, it would appear to be a similiar situation. It would have been to Yahoo's advantage (and the end-users advantage) for Yahoo to track how well it's search engine performed and how often it had to default to alta vista.
Now, AOL has come out saying they don't collect the information (and most folks on the net are behind a firewall or using a dynamic IP anyway) so it's not as big of a deal as it's being made out to be. This article mentions the 'potential' to be Spyware but it doesn't make clear the fact that in practice, AOL is not tracking anything.
Besides, you can disable this feature if you are really nervous about it (as some folks mentioned previously). The fact of the matter is though, that by allowing AOL to collect this data, you are simpling improving your search results.
BTW: This article also doesn't make it clear that if you goto www.google.com, nothing is tracked. The only time it is actually tracked is if you only enter a word (instead of a URL) in the location bar. I don't think many people use this feature that frequently anyway though. It's been there for a while though.
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
Notice the question mark at the end is gone.
So we give Netscrape the benefit of the doubt, I guess. Like another poster said - whatever is not Microsoft. It doesn't matter how bad it is.
Kinda ass-backward if you ask me.
Google has a program where you get paid 3 cents per referral to their website. Why shouldn't a software maker be allowed to do the same thing millions of websites are already doing.
Perhaps Netscape should remain broke and concentrate on producing another crap browser like Lynx. No cookies, no script, no java, nothing to worry about.
This post was sponsered by LYNX, the official browser of Slashdot Monkeys.
...When you use the "search bar" or whatever that's built into a browser? I noticed a LONG time ago that those things went through Netscape's/M$'s/whoever's servers, and stopped using them before I ever really started.
The only features of your browser you should be able to use without stupid behind-the-scenes stuff happening are:
- entering URLs manually
- bookmarking and returning to bookmarked pages
- clicking on links in web pages
I guess this just gets back to the basic function of web browsers - retrieving and displaying web pages. If you do anything beyond this with your browser then you have no right to complain about what it's doing behind-the-scenes.
Of course this is all just IMHO, but honestly I think it's just a bunch of hot air...
Arguing about vi versus Emacs is like arguing whether it's better to make fire by rubbing sticks or banging rocks.
Maybe we need to follow the lead of the Europeans and get some laws against this 'phone-home' garbage. Why is it legal for a company to do this without warning the end-user?
Well not a thousand times, only once. But hey theres lots of fun stuff to be found doing it!
like this!
internet explorer doesn't even support 'position: fixed'... konq does. konq's gonna beat the crap out of IE.
In xpfe components search datasets NetscapeSearch dot src there are 6 matches (see below).
Looks to me like if you enable Netscape searches in Mozilla you get the same thing, but I don't see Mozilla reporting other searches to Netscape.
As far as Alexa goes, since I see people asking about that too (results removed due to lameness filter), there is only one match of relevance, in the xpfe components related resources related-paned (dot) js file (see below).
So, it looks like the "What's Related" panel is the only place where Alexa gets info from the browser.
I had posted a find and grep command which showed 6 hits for the Netscape info information, and 5 hits for Alexa information in the Mozilla 0.9.8 source tree. Informative, terse, useful (IMHO). What follows is my commentary as I tried to get this post under the lameness filter -- resulting in the useless shit post you see above.
Now evidently the last part of this triggered the wondrous lameness filter, so I'd like to say a few things here in hopes of getting this post past: first of all CmdrTaco is a fucking moron. Second what is the deal (and yes, I clearly have the source) with Mozilla's textarea entry widget? This thing is a nightmare to use. Don't even pretend to try to cut-and-paste into this thing if you want to produce readable results.
That doesn't appear to be sufficient so I've removed the lines from the Alexa grep which just provide a copyright notice. CmdrTaco is a fucking mongoloid retard. Still no dice. Fucktard. Lamer fucking idiot. Fuck you and your monolithic Perl script.
Ok. Gone are the info search lines which are in the layout bug tests (and not part of searching). Here's hoping. Nope, no dice. God I wish I were as fucking 1337 as CmdrTaco. I bet I'd get my ass slammed by homeless guys every fucking weekend. This site has become a shithole. How fucking useless. Censoring fucking retard. As if they have any fucking taste.
Now I've taken out all the non-matching Alexa hits. Still no dice. Oh the fucking wisdom in enabling intellectual exchange by censoring trolls and spammers. Oh you've really done the community a fucking service by making it possible for us to edit our posts 12 times so we can have a truly enlightened exchange. You back-assed Michigan Nazi fuck.
Took out the search path, no help, still too many "junk" characters. Too many junk-addicted assholes running this fucking site. I've now actually taken out the find and grep command I used to perform the searches, since I guess that's not informative. Let's see if that works. Nope. Colon off the end of the first sentence... Nope. I removed the path info for the files matching the netscape site... no help.
This is the stupidest shit I have ever seen. I just took out all the matches for info.netscape.com and I'm still triggering the lameness filter. Finally, I removed the Alexa results as well and now the post passes the lameness filter.
So, basically I can't provide a post with any information in it if I want it to appear on the site.
Bye, slashdot, and CmdrTaco -- one last FUCK YOU to you. Shithead.
"Cause there's 40 different shades of black, so many fortresses and ways to attack, so why you complainin'?"
First off, Microsoft does the same thing. The only difference is that their automatic search goes to Microsoft and they log there rather than having to do the more obvious redirect.
Second off, this is only if you use the search button. If you go to google.com and type in your search then Netscape/AOL gets no information.
Now, let's imagine if they got all the information from you. A unique ID string and all your search queries. They compile this data on your for an entire year. Great. Now, what the hell do they do with it? The only possible use for this would be to detect your string, cross-reference and munge all of this data, and present you with a slightly more targeted pop-up ad.
Well, guess what, another company already tried this. Remember them? They were called DoubleClick. In that case they had hundreds of web sites helping them to gather all of this information about browsers and what did they do with it? They couldn't turn a profit, they couldn't even target ads very well (if at all).
Think about it people. Yeah, it stinks that they're gathering this information. Yeah, they should be more forthcoming about what happens when you hit that Search button. Sure you can go an boycott them and add this to the '1 bazillion + 1 reasons that AOL is evil' list, but in the end, what does this get them?
Nada.
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
This is a general issue, not only related to AOL, M$, Apple, SUN, and other behemoths.
What DO we know about the binaries released by the distros? Nothing.
No flames please, i'm just stating the obvious.
Props to Aanallein for the info. This person found the solution. It is on the 2nd page so no one will see it. That is why I am linking it on this thread. This post has the solution
As Aanallein points out, Mozilla will phone home ONLY IF you use Netscape's search, BUT NOT Google's in the Search button.
It's ALWAYS been like this. In the past companies and politicians were more discreet. They just can't help themselves now. Have to have their hands in the cookie jar at all times, whether anyone is looking or not.
Additionally, information travels a lot faster now. Used to be plenty of choke points were they could hide. Pay off a handful of people in the media industry, and that's be it. Newspaper television, radio. Where else could people hear about stuff? Nowhere.
Simple..when you first open netscape it could ask ..
Example.. We aggregate data from your searches
for marketing research purposes.Do you want to
participate ? Y N
Simple.. people who'd say yes would ex be entered in some sweepstake to win a cd version of the app..
It would stink as a prize but i guess you get the drift.
What a freakin' moron
I am referring to THIS older article, which never made it to the front page of /.
My server
I changed that to search for "images" here. Now, can someone explain why the "gnome" logo appears?
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
So neither Microsoft's IE or AOL's Netscape should either.
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
one, the information they collect is not personally identifiable. Did you sign-in to use the browser. No. Then how do they know who you are. (and don't say IP address). two, if you're netscape, how do you bill those people that are getting placement in the browser, like a google, goto, just put them in for free? Do you really think that Netscape wants to rely on google logs and let them tell netscape how much they really should be paying? Right... three, it's not like you can't go to mycroft.mozdev.org and configure a sherlock plug-in without the Netscape redirects in there... four, what the hell are they going to do with search information on an individual basis? Not a damn thing. Can you imagine the size of the logs and the data warehouse that this needs for them to truly track your every move. The only entity that can do this is the gov't. Even AOL can't afford to do this. give it up. You guys make no sense. Oh, and far as the cookie comment...Netscape created cookies to establish a means to provide saving information for cross-sessions not for advertising.
I use a Meta-Engine Program on Windows called Copernic to do 99% of my searchs. I don't do my searches through a browser. Copernic 2001 Basic for windows is free. I basically does the same thing as goggle but it allows you to select the engines you go to (including google), how many results to return from each search engine and how many results in total. You can also choose how you sort the data. There are a lot more options if you buy!
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
So i was curious about what was actually being sent to AOL when one did a google search from the netscape bar. Here's the HTTP request: /fwd/lksidus_gg/http://www.google.com/search?q=tes tpriv9&sourceid=mozilla-search HTTP/1.1
GET
Host: info.netscape.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:0.9.2) Gecko/20010726 Netscape6/6.1
Accept: text/xml, application/xml, application/xhtml+xml, text/html;q=0.9, image/png, image/jpeg, image/gif;q=0.2, text/plain;q=0.8, text/css, */*;q=0.1
Accept-Language: en-us
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,compress,identity
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1, utf-8;q=0.66, *;q=0.66
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
There's also the usual data stuffed in the TCPIP header, such as IP address. There are some additional g'day requests to info.netscape.com which might contain unique ID information and would also be matched to TCPIP header info, but if there are any explicit UIDs in this packet i must be missing em.
The developers probably had a good reason for setting things up this way: If the URL for a search engine changed, they could always update their fwd script and prevent users from going to a broken page. Unfortunately, this means data gets sent to a site other than that intended by the user. A much better way of doing this would be for the client to check for updates to the search URLs and store them locally.
Just some thoughts.
JS - IBM Metaverse devteam
The opinions expressed here are mine & not necessarily representative of IBM
As result, do NOT even look in the general direction of someone elses computer. Importantly, do NOT use someone elses computer or thier subsequent use will be attributted to you FOREVER.
All your Internet browsing transactions are registered in the US copyright office in book form next to the Star Registry!
You have been warned!
Not only that, but IE's 'looking at content' thing that you describe is actually rather handy for tricking pages that don't allow offsite linking (Geocities for instance) into letting you do so.
As for all the insecure ActiveX stuff, I'd rather have 99.9% of pages work / look exactly as they were designed to (including all the diabolical ActiveX stuff that could kill my PC were I so foolish as to follow random links from ICQ messages) than have some degree of childminding from a more secure browser that doesn't look like Joe Webmaster designed it to look.
(Having said that, it's decided today that it can't auto-detect page encoding. This browser window is using Chinese Traditional at the moment. Gah.)
- Chris
It just occured to me that if Microsoft ever wants to stop the open source movement dead in its tracks, all they have to do is write a bunch of free Linux software, utilities. Small stuff like browsers, media players, disk utilities, but fill them periodically with spyware and big brother add ons. The open source community will get in such an uproar over the misuse of their "precious personal data" (that no one really cares about in the first place) that they'll spend all their time coding and hacking away to get rid of the spyware or create new apps altogether to replace what they had to give up. A sort of play on the paranoid neuroticism of the open source community itslef.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
I don't know any distribution of Linux that would ship with Netscape preinstalled. Everyone has Mozilla, and since konqueror and galeon are far better, practically nobody even uses Netscape. I guess M$ is now FU. Netscape spyware, IE spyware, Mozilla and Opera well I don't know many users that would know them. Guess I'll just stay Ok with spyware fact
To play the devil's advocate, (and get modded down for it, of course) why shouldn't they see a ROA? They put money into the development of the program, and it's used by thousands of people, who all use Netscape bandwidth, so why not? Sure, it'd be nice if they TOLD us it was spyware, and even better if they wern't collecting information that can be tracked to the browser, but that's life. Deal with it. The government does it all the time. I don't mind giving Netscape/AOL some revenue so that they can develop a decent competitor to IE.
I would expect something like this out of Microsoft Internet Explorer,..but Netscape?
*starts using IE*
oh well soon i will be using LYNX and i wont have to deal with either
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Not in Netscape, you can't.
/. OSS supporting company A does something that is terrible. Huge security hole, gathering of data, etc. It is brought up and defended here.
Netscape is a comercial product. Mozilla is not, but that's not what we're talking about.
The hypocracy here is that people are saying "oh, it's Netscape, so I'll believe whatever they tell me and think it's ok."
Let's face it, if IE sent information about your searches back to Microsoft, you would have a screaming fit. Even if there was an option to turn that off, you would still be cry foul.
I have seen this many times on
If Microsoft does it, all hell is raised.
The PR release for both can be the same, basically saying "look, we're not actually doing anything with this information. it goes to our servers, sits there and is eventually used to get a general profile of our users without any specific information being applied to anyone." If OSS supporting company does, that's fine. Microsoft does it, it's a lie and a furthering of their monopolistic strategies.
I'm not defending Microsoft. All I'm doing is pointing out the double standard of many here.
"All the things I really like to do are either immoral, illegal, or fattening."
- Alexandar Woolcot
I guess its a good thing I use galeon. :)
That has got to be the funniest thing I've heard in a long time. Reign of terror on what, interns? It took him 8 years of reagonomics to balance the budget, and Bush took care of that in what, 8 months? He is so lucky that he can use Sept. 11th as an excuse.
Synergy is your friend
you mean the CIA HASNT been wiretapping me for the past 6 months (or at least scince i've joined what used to be an international/internet terrorist orginization ...or at least listening to pirate radio?...surely either the CIA or CSIS has been on notice of me for quite some time :)
oh yea and i agree... i'll bake cookies for anyone who can prove they killed bill gates and or took down everything microsoft offline for at least a week. (mmm...home baked cookies)
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
The question is, what are you going to do with your badge of honor?
Netscape 6 sucks, why would anyone use that POS. Download Mozilla it's the same with less bugs .. a lot of bugs .. but less.
Yesterday Mozilla was running at over 75% processor power. I have a dual processor system, so I guess the app needs 1.5 processors sometimes. Strange .. Photoshop never needs that much.
it's a sig, wtf?
It's a trivial fix, really. Windows Media Player records the list in a file. Just make the file read-only! Problem solved.
Here's the file name for Windows XP:
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Media Index\wmplibrary_v_0_12.db
Here's the file name for Windows ME:
c:\Windows\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Media Index\wmplibrary_v_0_12.db
Here's the file name for Windows 98:
c:\Windows\wmplibrary_v_0_12.db
The easiest way to find the file is to search your disk for "wmplibrary". Then right-click up the properties for that file and make it read-only.
This spying behavior has been around for a long time. I noticed it a year or so ago, and made the log file read-only. It's been working fine ever since, without writing a log.
You can see the log in the Windows Media Player by pressing the "Media Library" button and opening up the outlines. Just make sure to clear out the log first, before you make it read-only. When you delete an item from the log, it goes into "deleted items" folder. So make sure you finally clear out the "deleted items" section of the log.
I found the log file by using Igor Arsenin's "taskinfo" utility, that lets you see all the files any process has open. Taskinfo is a great tool for figuring out what logs any Windows programs are keeping. Solid Russian engineering. Use it to spy on the spyware!
-Don
PS: I posted this before, but nobody replied if it worked or not. Has anyone else used this fix for defeating Windows Media Player? What other versions of Windows and Media Player does it work on? Can anyone please suggest other tools like Taskinfo that are useful for rooting out spyware?
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
Start using linux, no IE, no Netscape
Information = $ to any company. Whether they use it to sell to you or sell it to someone else. Dont we all get weird shit in the mail and wonder how they found our address?
God forbid they put this same sort of crap in WinAmp!
When I use IE on a really slow network connection, when you put the URL into the 'Search' bar on IE -- it contacts somewhere -- Microsoft I guess -- to "search" for the URL you just put in.
has no one else seen this?
I personally am *sick* of the web looking like the designer wants it to rather than like I want it to look. I browse at a high enough res. that many pages reduce to the middle third of my screen. What a waste. And for God's sake, why insert hard coded returns? Text should *wrap*. At the very least put the "printer" button at the top, and don't load anything until I can trigger it (better still, lets code a "print option"-bot :-)
I use Opera and Mozilla.
Opera is fast, uses a fraction of the system resources the Moz and IE do (around 4 megs of ram, compared to 20). It almost never crashes. When it does, it automatically takes you to the last page you viewed. Also, no spyware works with it.
However, the mozilla interface is just badass. (^;
I have 2 words to say about IE: It blows.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
I haven't seen these yet. 1. Is this legal? Does Netscape include this info (that they will collect your search data) in their liscence agreement? I don't remember seeing it, but that could be me... 2. I spent about an hour googlewhacking on Netscape once. I wonder what that does to their results?
It's sorta a chopped down mozilla browser without too much crap. Lots of good privacy stuff, like a pop-up killer and customizable browser id string. Still v0.6 but if you like gecko, K-Meleon is your man.
;)
I hope that helps you save your soul...
When I grow up, I want to have Christopher Walken hair.
It IS sad, and that's it for Netscape. I'm removing all Netscape versions from the computers under my control.
Bush's education improvements were
That sent them a list of any files you were downloading? ... It shouldn't surprise anyone that Alexa is involved in this. Alexa was the same company that put out a combo web browser buddy + stock market valuator. (At the risk of a lawsuit) This gave them the ability to not only track where users surfed to, but also monitor those who used the features stock portfolios to see which way the sheep were herding. (If you can't see how information like this can be used for fun and profit you just aren't dark enough yet). They even got the nice people at CNET to plug it for them.
:)
On another note: You can block some of this activity out by going to the host(s) file and making your own entry.
127.0.0.1 alexa.com
or
0.0.0.0 flashpoint.com
...Just insert your target there and it will bounce back to local host. If you run a webserver you may want to put something else in that box. I'm not sure how to do it for products that field their query by IP and not names. Maybe you have to run your own DNS/NAT to get prevent those from getting access?
This also isn't the only way companies spy on you. Akamai/Lycos have a clever way of doing it with both referrer headers http://lycos.com/url?=realurl. Plus they own such a large portion of the network that they can get their cookies to work on any part of it. Go to say: http://www.wired.com and watch how many connections it makes to your computer, and watch the url handling in the right hand corner...
All this reminds me of the @ and %40 tricks that were used by porno spammers in IRC in the olden days.
Freedom is merely privilege extended unless enjoyed by one and all.
Ah, but it's not a double standard when dealing with open source software because if anybody was actually reading the code with perhaps intent to contribute something (assuming the code was, in fact, legible), they'd be able to see a not-quite-authorized data transmission. Then they disable it and recompile and go on their merry way, pausing only to b|+ch slap the idiot who put it in there in the first place.
With Netscape (pawn of AOL) or Internet Exploiter (tool of Microsoft), they're pretty adamant about covering up their code to protect their "IP". But their protection of IP means that I'm no longer certain how well my privacy is being protected which lowers my overall opinion of them. And when they do this sort of thing often and repeatedly (Windows Media Player, Windows XP Activation, etc) in difficult-to-avoid pieces of software, I'm really given to wonder how big their consumer databases are -- after all, their SQL Server 2000 ads say they can grow by terabytes and be just fine...
Did we mention that circumvention of these info-creep functions in commercial (non-Open Source) software could be violations of the DMCA?
If it weren't for the fact that they never seem to have a f'king clue as to who I am when I call for support, I might be seriously concerned about my privacy in MS-land.
I already have written my own web browser, which just happens to have the best CSS2 support out there. It doesn't take any corporate money to produce a superior Open Source product.
Matthias Ettrich
Founder, KDE project
I think I've got an entry for Junkbuster's re_filterfile that will strip the info.netscape.com stuff and just take you directly to google's search results:
i g
s/'http://info.netscape.com/fwd/lksidus_gg/'///
Just remember to restart junkbuster.
Don't know what Junkbuster is? See junkbuster.com
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
This really, really makes you wonder if there's any company (business) out there who you can actually trust no matter what they promise or what they say. I'm starting to feel pessimistic about that. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one...
I wonder if there could be some way to represent the information in the article to users. The EULA would be the ideal place to put this, in the true sense of the word. Where 'ideal' meant 'never reflected in reality'. People wouldn't read it.
The point is, people aren't even really given the opportunity to find out about this. Only the technically-minded have found out about it, and only they will do something to address the situation. Shouldn't AOL/Netscape tell you what they are doing?
========================================
Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
This is just a question, could you cache it with a proxy so that the next time it access the proxy's copy and doesnt report to AOL?
or, what do you think the AOL thing is coded on, PHP? ASP? Perl/other cgi? something else?
If netscape needs information to sell/share to it's partners so it can get more revenue and keep producing great products, that's fine. You don't have to use their browser. A more interesting question is that did you agree to it in the EULA?
I'm glad you asked that question. No, he did not.
I happen to maintain an archive of licence agreements for common proprietary Linux software, including the one for Netscape 6.1. It includes a clause that the "he Product may automatically send information relating to the download and install process to Netscape", but nothing about post-installation spying.
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
I can remember the days when logging someone's IP address was *never* used as a means of determining unique individuals because people who wrote this software actually understood how computers actually worked, and thus understood that one computer is not the same thing as one user. I used to run Netscape off of a server onto X-terminal
software, along with several office-mates at the same time. It used to work just fine, until sites started assuming one IP == one user, and got their cookies horribly confused when we'd both hit the same site. I remember once getting the shopping cart for someone else popping up on my screen at a computer parts seller website - sure enough it thought I was him because we had the same IP.
We would also have problems trying to reply to online surveys, which would falsely accuse us of being one person trying to double-vote.
But now that most people browse via Windows sites have started assuming that it's just plain impossible for two different people to have the same IP address.
Again, as always, I blame Microsoft for dumbing-down the computer industry and removing functionality by making their crippled system the only standard people have to bother supporting.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Go to your MOZILLA_HOME/dist/bin/searchplugins/ and look for the file called "NetscapeSearch.src", and comment out the action commands, or nuke the whole damn script.
Yes, this site is biased towards OSS. It's (gasp) TRUE! But remember, MS-haters are not born, they're made. I used to HATE *nix, hate-hate-hate. Now Linux is my preferred system (Slackware 8). MS over a period of time drove me nuts.
They did it through the exact same sleazy practices we see here by AOL/Netscape. OSS is supposed to be above this. The biggest difference I see is this:
- When there's a bug, the OSS world it posts for all to see and deals with it, clsoed source tries to bury it until patched or people forget
- OSS products, since they are "by the people and for the people", shouldn't have garbage like this. Such tactics are reserved for the likes of the Company That Shall Not Be Named
OSS is held to a higher standard, and in general, meets it. Sure there are bugs and security lapses. The point isn't are they there, it's are they dealt with and known to people instead of sweeping them under the rug. With OSS I have a mugh higher degree of confidence that something is secure because people are digging through the code looking. With closed source... Probably, maybe, unlikely? Who knows? Heck, many of the OSS security alerts are found going through code and never have an implmentation!Is there bias? Yes. Tolerance for this kind of garbage? No.
Computer Science is Applied Philosophy
damn, that's one creepy lookin' lizard!
is that new?
putfwd.com - 1GB Free file storage with a twist
Um, I take offense to that. My name is Joe User and yes I do know what Mozilla is and no I am not a geek.
the solution is simple: it's nothing moer than an extra deny in a firewall :)
and for doubleclick: my virusscanner sees it as an 'evil' site and blocks it...
Privacy is terrorism.
Seems that AOL is diverting to Microsoft tactics to make headway in the industry. What people will do for money, huh?
This is great publicity for Netscape. It's ironic that the "Get Netscape 6.2" banner occasionally shows up on Slashdot, yet there is an article about it having Spyware it in.
Oooh, I want Netscape 6.2 (SARCASTIC STATEMENT)
If you've been on the web so long, why do you have such a high Slashdot user id?
This could sound kind of crazy, but I just got this idea into mi mind:
What about Mozilla, Konqueror, Galeon, having in Preferences an option called "Help to the community getting banners". If you check this box, sometimes (you could adjust the time) you would get a banner from Mozilla sponsors, so you were giving money to the devealopers in an easy way. And if you want, you can uncheck that option and you dont get this banners. I would use that option, and thousands of people would, if they were sure that this money is going to support these applications, the FSF, etc.
Think about every time you start kde or gnome, a banner loads in your desktop. This way thousands of people would be giving money to the open source community. Of course its *very important* that you can disable this "feature" whith the options, but Im pretty sure that lots of people would have this option enabled just for helping the community.
I think its a good way to get funds for the open source community.
DVD Ripping, Divx, VCD, SVCD under Linux
Does Newsbytes have any proof? All they have is what is apparently a redirect link. They don't *prove* that the IP address is grabbed and that data is collected. The Netscape spokesman says that they use the redirect link to bill the search providers, which makes sense (think of it as Amazon.com Associates for browsers).
those same media moguls bought and paid for our "elected" officials a long time ago. what big business wants, big business gets. and that's the (unwritten) law. wanna do something about it? revolt! grab an uzi and start mowing down as many CEOs and congressmen as you can. start with jack valenti and hilary rosen.
Neoplanet was Bigfoot's "Next Big Thing" to Windows versions of Netscape and IE. It was basically some silly add-on that had some search functions and keyword crap in it similar to AOL. Bigfoot no longer promotes it, but it's still available. They now state their vision as being leader in "Marketing Relationship Management". Sounds like a spammer wet dream to me. I was wondering if anyone has used it and saw anything fishy going on. A couple of my friends swear by it, but it looks like just another useless gizmo to me.
An interesting side note about Bigfoot: A few years ago I knew someone that worked there, and she set me up with a Bigfoot For Life address. It was free, it worked pretty good, and since I was constantly switching ISP's at the time due to crappy service and whatnot, their forwarding was great. Unfortunately, a couple years ago they started charging, and on top of that, I started seeing spam coming through my Bigfoot addy AND my regular address at the same time. Yay. I dropped them, changed my Verizon alias, and it all stopped. I guess the saying is true, "All good things must come to an end." Either that, or sell out to spammers.
Get a life!
For the sake of argument, let's take for granted that searching from the location bar is something we really want to implement, and you want to allow your users to configure their browser to search using a variety of available engines.
Because you have no control over the interface to these other engines your only logical choice is something like what Netscape's doing -- send a uniform query back to a single place that you control, where it can be parsed and sent to the appropriate place in the appropriate form. Otherwise, you get into needing to update your browser if/whenever any search engine changes its query interface.
Of course, I'm sure this post will only be read by very few people, and almost certainly not modded up to be of any interest...
The icon for this story seems eerily appropriate.
I did the search for Crosssdressing Monkey Porno but there was no way that I was going to hit the I'm Feeling Lucky button!
Way to invoke Godwin's Law there, sport.
Corporations have had the ability to spy on us for years. My auto insurance company knows everything about my driving history. My health insurance company knows everything about my medical history. My bank knows the date, time, and place of every purchase I've ever made and every dollar I've ever withdrawn from my account. Do I give a flying fuck if AOL knows that, on Sunday, March 10th, I typed in "large-breasted women" into my Search box? Hey, did you know that anyone sitting in a NOC anywhere along the route from my computer to www.google.com's CIDR block can do the same thing?
Why do you morons only trust certain companies??? Put your money where your mouth is; hide it under your mattress. Drive without a license or insurance. Never go to a doctor. People can and will collect information about you, with and without your knowledge. What are you going to do about it? Sit here on slashdot and preach to the choir?
Put up, shut up, or do something about it.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
I couldn't get this to work with netscape 6.2 on Windows 98 (prefs.js was a user preferences file and deleted the "pref(..." line when I quit, and the all-ns.js is apparently ignored), but this worked for me:
1) Edit C:\Program Files\Netscape\Netscape 6\searchplugins\SBWeb_0?.src, where the question mark is a single digit (there is one file for each search option).
2) change the "action=..." line so it no longer has "http://info.netscape.com/fwd/(something)/", but just has "http://(search engine)".
3) Change updateCheckDays to from 1 to 100000.
4) Cross fingers.
It's been that way for a *long* time, and it can't be called "spyware" when it's blatantly obvious to anyone with any knowledge understanding of web browsers! And this is an extremely non-intrusive means of measuring web browser-generated referrals.
If it wasn't obvious to you, then you're pretty sad. I mean honestly, I wouldn't expect my *mother* to realize that netscape is collecting referal info when she sees the the URL in the status bar gets redirected through Netscape - but she also doesn't give a phuk.
On the other hand, if any person I work with in a tech position bounced into my office claiming to have discovered this "spyware", I'd immediately mark him off my mental list of those qualified to keep their jobs. Haven't you ever looked at your bookmarks and noticed that the ones that netscape supplies get passed through their redirector?
This is a perfectly valid means of gathering metrics on their own service and browser - and it is THEIR browser, after all. If you don't like it, change the bookmarks, change the search URL, and/or use the address bar.
This outcry over "spyware" has far too many qualities in common with the situation when the newbie internet users from AO(HEL)L first flooded onto the net and began bitching because they found pages they didn't like.
Just shut up till you get a clue. Newsbytes should have been knowledgeable not to post that crap.
Who cares? The search engines already keep track of what people search for! What does it matter?? I think people have to realize that nothing we do online is "private".
AOL knowing what I search for is the least of my worries!
But IE4 and later sometimes *do* send info back to a M$ server. This was documented and the info posted to alt.privacy.spyware about a year ago (can't find the article offhand, but others reproduced the finding). Seems if IE4+ hits a webpage containing a certain CLSID string, it relays your current location (and I forget what all else) to a server that proved part of the M$-owned IP block. No one knew what this is supposed to accomplish, tho it sounds like some sort of market-tracking.
Tho I agree there is too much kneejerk "M$ is evil!" reaction around here. Like every company, they do good things and bad things, each often defined solely by one's point of view.
Being a neanderthal, I still use NS3.04 by *preference*. And I dearly wish for a NS3 interface and menu structure that could be skinned or otherwise applied to NS6.x or Mozilla 6.x. I don't use IE mainly because I can't stand how it operates, not because of any evil habits it may have.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
You should be able fix this by editing the URLs of the sherlock files in the searchplugins folder or replacing them with the ones included in Mozilla.
I recently installed Netscape 6 and and one of the first things it did was try to open a connection to etph.netscape.com, which my firewall blocked. I assume "etph" stands for "ET phone home." Does anyone know what this does?
...when half of our programs are already spying on us? This sucks.
Of course, Netscape 6 was buggy, slow, and idiotic. If you use it, you deserve to be spied on.
http://rl.netscape.com/wtgn?www.yahoo.com
(Note that the XML won't display in all browsers.)
How do I know? Easy...I run rl.netscape.com.
-BK
Chemical Blog
Steve Case is satan =>
http://www.sysinternals.com has a bunch of great tools for debugging/reverse engineering. I use Filemon and Regmon all the time, to debug problems on NT servers.
Have we also forgotten everyone else in the line? How about your favourite ISP and anyone between you and google?
:)
At least google respect people using it's engine, we only got to look at Yahoo to see that they already collect this plus what link you click on.
Wonder what the world would be like if they actually learnt and reported the truth!
Enduring freedom... hehehe
Since Netscape's own search seems to be taking about 1.75 seconds tonight, this extra delay makes Google look slower than Netscape, when it's actually faster.
Try it yourself. Search Google from the Netscape toolbar, then from the Google site.
My first guess was that maybe one of the posters inserted a malformed tag that confused Konqueror. I saved the page, deleted all the posts, and loaded the modified page back into Konqueror. The problem persisted.
I changed every single character in the file (except the title), and the problem persisted. Note: I sometimes had to refresh the page using the contextual menu before the problem showed up.
Finally, I deleted the word "Netscape" from the title, and presto! the problem went away. Then I tried various combinations. It seems that when Konqueror 2.2.2 (I haven't tried other versions) sees a page with "Netscape" (case sensative) in the title, it frequently messes up the mouse wheel!
Eww you're calling it George W. Bush. I hereby destroy your FP, & claim this FP in the name of your moms right nipple.
Special people have long socks, ride short buses, & invent witty sigs.
If you get AIDS, having sex with a virgin will cure you!
Special people have long socks, ride short buses, & invent witty sigs.
Opera crashes even more than Netscape 4.7.
It's things like this that make me a Microsoft man! I run Internet Explorer, so I'm not the least bit afraid of there being any spyware involved... especially since I connecct to Windows Update and transmit my complete system information and every relevant bit of information on a frequent basis to make sure that I have latest "bug fixes"!!!!
:-)
Corbets
MOD PARENT UP +5 FUNNY!
Netscape 6???? That can't be accurate sample data they collect. I'm sure that only samples the TRULY masochistic Internet surfers! Use Mozilla
sHow long has this been going on ....... la la la
yes NS4.x and NS6.x heck those verions have been around for *ages* ! And all someone had to do was spot an outgoing request to a non requested address - so much for our net.police Hello anybody there?
It amazes me that NS had the balls to do this so brazenly - NETSCAPE MUST MAKE AN OFFICIAL STATEMENT on this NOW !!
Isn't there a site somewhere checking for spyware hidden inside products?
version 0.0002
You've bashed Opera and Netscape. What browser do you think is better than Mozilla? Mosaic? Lynx? HotJava? Links?
Don't say IE, because IE does not comply with RFC2616 HTTP/1.1 content-type header (it shows text/plain documents as if they were text/html documents). See my site for a demo.
Make even shorter URLs - 8LN.org
excerpted from http://www.opera.com/order/
Why Buy Opera?
Remove the banner advertisement
Increase the browsing window area
Browse the web your way
Surf freely and discreetly
Help Opera continue to make the best possible browser
Doesn't sound as if you're surfing freely and discreetly with their bannerware version...
Yet another advantage to using Konqueror. Added to the list:
Integrated
Fast?
Free
Controls Pop-ups and unders.
Controls Cookies
I gave up on Netscape when 4.x stopped responding to my mouse clicks. Not just one one machine, on 3 machines with completely different hardware and software. That and the crashing and current bloated state sort of wears you out.
I use Opera to browse now, it's much more powerful and flexible. I use IE if I have to browse a site that's heavy on Java or uses Flash, which isn't very often. The things I love most about Opera: You can completely disable popups, and you can set it to throw all your cookies away on exit. That way you get the best of both worlds, sites that require cookies still work but you're not saving the cookies from one session to the next. Muhahahaha!
Open your HOSTS file (found in C:\WINDOWS for 9x or C:\WINT\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\ETC for NT\2k) and add the following line:
127.0.0.0 info.netscape.com
That will prevent any information from going to or from that server. Since it's only function appears to be to receive spy data, problem solved.
"Da ist ein Technölüst in mein Unterpanten!"
ahh the google toolbar, what an excellent piece of spyware (according to the latest ad-aware from lavasoft.de)
i hope you are enjoying it
got it?
i cant afford another computer right now, but when i do i will make it a linux box.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
I write my own homepage. it has links to here, tom's, my ftp, my web site, my free spam collector, comics, and satire. I realized i didn't want to connect to the internet everytime i want to open up mozilla. so i wrote myself some html, and now my homepage is fast and i can go the places I need to in one link. I'm thinking of adding some weather and some news...
Who is this Anonymous Coward character, how does he post so much, and why is he always such a whore?
I you really want/have to use Netscape6 instead of Mozilla, you can always copy the searchplugins directory from Mozilla. These go directly to the sites, and work fine.