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."

Comments

Sloppy Journalism

[guttentag]

From the article:

According to a network traffic analysis performed by Newsbytes, Netscape is capturing Navigator 6 users' search terms, along with their Internet protocol (IP) address, the date Navigator was installed and a unique identification number.

This should be easy for AOL to deny, since there is no product called Navigator 6. It's simply called "Netscape 6" now. You could argue that this is a minor detail the reporter screwed up, but I think you have to question the reporter's understanding of a subject if he doesn't know the name of the product he's writing about.

In journalism schools, getting a name wrong earns you an automatic failure. Apparently Newsbytes doesn't hold its reporters to such a high standard.

Re:Easy Solution

[Metrol]

Don't use it. Uninstall NS6 and use Mozilla instead.

By chance would you happen to have the "Related Sites" tab enabled (as is by default) in your installation of Mozilla? Don't care if you've ever used the side bar or not, as it doesn't matter.

Even Moz sends back some kind of information Alexa. Came to discover this one day using my laptop off-line on a web site I had running locally. Couldn't figure out why I kept getting these intermittent "Can't connect to network" messages. Had me going nuts, thinking there was some glitch with my site code.

I haven't a clue what kind of information Alexa is having sent to them. I do know that if you turn that tab off, Moz stops feeding information that way.

Changing face of computing

[DunbarTheInept]

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.