'Cause the US is the only rock star left in this shabby little dive we call a planet.
You know a lot about all kinds of celebrities, but they don't know a thing about you.
So deal with it, you silly little people.
American's don't give a damn about your country because countries don't mean shit. Ideas are where it's at, and the U.S. just happens to be a helluva producer and consumer of 'em.
I WISH I lived in the U.S., just so I could be insulated from all this bitching and moaning.
These "web bugs" are nothing new, and do nothing more insidious than can be done with ANY other type of HTTP request.
Any web resource can be used to track you. You could have web bug *.jar's, web bug *.js's, web bug *.htm's, web bug *.php's, or web bug *.pl's ALL DAY LONG but we wouldn't call 'em web bugs. We'd call it information accumulators being a little more aggressive we're particularly comfortable with.
The problem is not with images, but rather that you can include just about anything you like in the query search portion (the part after the ?) of the URL of any HTTP request.
I develop opt-in marketing automation software (ummm...the pay's good?;), and we've been gathering info for years. To this point, our high-ups don't know much about it, but we developers use it as an easy way for the browser to communicate back to the server without having to do full submissions. Used this way, it can save lots of unnecessary traffic. Can be a very handy, and useful feature.
Of course it's going to be capitalized on, tho.
Don't see of much way around it, since the "web bug" doesn't have to come from a different server at all. Once processed, the original request can be forwarded to any server the original recipient likes.
Guess someone could add a scrubber component to the browser's which'd truncate the URL's at the ?, but chances are lots of requests would fail if that would happen...
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'Cause the US is the only rock star left in this shabby little dive we call a planet.
You know a lot about all kinds of celebrities, but they don't know a thing about you.
So deal with it, you silly little people.
American's don't give a damn about your country because countries don't mean shit.
Ideas are where it's at, and the U.S. just happens to be a helluva producer and consumer of 'em.
I WISH I lived in the U.S., just so I could be insulated from all this bitching and moaning.
These "web bugs" are nothing new, and do nothing more insidious than can be done with ANY other type of HTTP request.
Any web resource can be used to track you. You could have web bug *.jar's, web bug *.js's, web bug *.htm's, web bug *.php's, or web bug *.pl's ALL DAY LONG but we wouldn't call 'em web bugs. We'd call it information accumulators being a little more aggressive we're particularly comfortable with.
The problem is not with images, but rather that you can include just about anything you like in the query search portion (the part after the ?) of the URL of any HTTP request.
I develop opt-in marketing automation software (ummm...the pay's good?;), and we've been gathering info for years. To this point, our high-ups don't know much about it, but we developers use it as an easy way for the browser to communicate back to the server without having to do full submissions. Used this way, it can save lots of unnecessary traffic. Can be a very handy, and useful feature.
Of course it's going to be capitalized on, tho.
Don't see of much way around it, since the "web bug" doesn't have to come from a different server at all. Once processed, the original request can be forwarded to any server the original recipient likes.
Guess someone could add a scrubber component to the browser's which'd truncate the URL's at the ?, but chances are lots of requests would fail if that would happen...
In the Pranks-Are-Stronger-Than-Principles vein...
Since it's the text that's copyrighted, and not the ideas contained within, what if we converted the offending posts to pig-latin?
or dialectized it into Austrian-Action-Star?
hmmm?