Firefox 's Ping Attribute: Useful or Spyware?

An anonymous reader writes "The Mozilla Team has quietly enabled a new feature in Firefox that parses 'ping' attributes to anchor tags in HTML. Now links can have a 'ping' attribute that contains a list of servers to notify when you click on a link. Although link tracking has been done using redirects and Javascript, this new "feature" allows notification of an unlimited and uncontrollable number of servers for every click, and it is not noticeable without examining the source code for a link before clicking it."

Comments

Privacy VS. Usability

[PlayfullyC1ever]

Honestly, this comes down to an almost Richard Stallman definition of Freedom. We can not have useful utilities such as this, without ignoring the privacy rights issues involved. And now before you question me, remember Stallman is mainly concerned with Freedom, not privacy. The two do happen to overlap, of course, but there's no reason to insult the man for caring, and for being aware of the issues. That's why most of us are here talking about it. Also, what Stallman seems "paranoid" about generally turns out to be the reality of the situation just a few years down the line. The man is a visionary, not a quack. The success of the Free Software movement, Open Source, and Linux, and the attempted corporate dominance of Internet Explorer, Microsoft, and others are all here as evidence of Stallman's deep understanding. Probably best not to deride the guy who's kept your online world sane, huh? ;) Setting that aside and addressing the article itself, I would point out that privacy is always a trade-off with ease of use. Regardless of what the ideal level of privacy is, we do need good privacy, which few of us have achieved. Real security and privacy is hard, and you're far more likely to run into usability issues before you run into overkill issues. So, I think it basically boils down to this: privacy vs. usability

Don't like Firefox spyware? Use Konqueror

[billybob2]

If you don't like Firefox's attempt to give away your privacy, there is a perfectly good FOSS browser you can use:

Konqueror

In some instances, it may render web pages even better than Firefox, since Konqueror passed the Acid2 test.

Re:Don't like Firefox spyware? Use Konqueror

[aichpvee]

Come on, man. I use KDE exclusively. I LOVE KDE and the gnomification of Firefox drives me NUTS (whoever put the gnome file dialogs into 1.5 is first up against the wall in the revolution), but Konqueror is not ready to replace Firefox. It lacks the real world compatibility, the features (which admittedly vanilla Firefox sorely lacks) provided by an extensive library of Firefox extensions, and it suffers severely from the feeling that it just doesn't know what it wants to be.

The rendering technology is definitely there in most areas but it lags behind both Firefox and Opera as a full web browser.

Also, it doesn't work with gmail's standard mode. Which isn't really Konqueror's fault.

Re:You can already do this with Javascript

[Hard_Code]

"Get your facts straight, this is not how cross-domain scripting works."

Oh really? You see because I really thought that cross-domain scripting works by a feature that did not exist before.

The point is that cross-site scripting leaks information (or worse) from a trusted site to a non-trusted site. Of course it doesn't "work" through URL pings. Duh. But it is the same class of security problem, genius.

And you are modded 0. That is just...appropriate.