Netscape Phones Home
March 9, 2002 8:12 AM Subscribe
Netscape Phones Home Yet another major software vendor snoops on users. Netscape, the former darling of the anti-Microsoft movement, captures search terms that users enter on third party sites if users have set the search tab in the sidebar to load a site other than Netscape's own search engine and sends information back to Netscape. Can you trust your own system anymore?
Use mozilla. Like Netscape 6 but without the whole AOL thing getting in the way. And please lets not get into the whole 'Netscape sux' thing we normally have at this point.
Isn't this just a simple forwarding the information, like an IP address is in the browser headers (the build number etc)?Personally I don't mind anonymised data being used to actually pay for my 'free' browser. If they were actually profiling people and targeting stuff based on that then i might get a bit more concerned.
posted by nedrichards at 9:22 AM on March 9, 2002
Isn't this just a simple forwarding the information, like an IP address is in the browser headers (the build number etc)?Personally I don't mind anonymised data being used to actually pay for my 'free' browser. If they were actually profiling people and targeting stuff based on that then i might get a bit more concerned.
posted by nedrichards at 9:22 AM on March 9, 2002
Like I need another reason not to use Netscape.
That said, MSIE does the same thing -- every once in a while when you start it up, it will get in touch with a microsoft site and send in version information, I believe with an IP address.
posted by precipice at 12:09 PM on March 9, 2002
That said, MSIE does the same thing -- every once in a while when you start it up, it will get in touch with a microsoft site and send in version information, I believe with an IP address.
posted by precipice at 12:09 PM on March 9, 2002
If you check in your IE options, precipice, you'll probably find that you've got your IE set to check for new versions on startup .. it's a default setting.. so that's probably what it's doing.
That said, when I was prompted to download the most recent version of IE, I did, and when I rebooted, I discovered (thanks to AdAware) that a new line for Alexa had been added to my registry without me knowing about it.
Arguably not spyware, still... I'd prefer to know what I install and what I don't. You probably do, too.
posted by crunchland at 1:20 PM on March 9, 2002
That said, when I was prompted to download the most recent version of IE, I did, and when I rebooted, I discovered (thanks to AdAware) that a new line for Alexa had been added to my registry without me knowing about it.
Arguably not spyware, still... I'd prefer to know what I install and what I don't. You probably do, too.
posted by crunchland at 1:20 PM on March 9, 2002
don't allow Windows Media Player access to the Internet.
As an aside, this doesn't work for me, since I use WMP for streaming media too. (None of that WMA license crap, though - I won't give in to that... but video streams, yes... although with video playback in Winamp supporting all the codecs I just might be able to ditch it for good... but I'm digressing from a digression.) So I just manually accept or reject whatever connections it tries to make.
posted by azazello at 10:40 PM on March 10, 2002
As an aside, this doesn't work for me, since I use WMP for streaming media too. (None of that WMA license crap, though - I won't give in to that... but video streams, yes... although with video playback in Winamp supporting all the codecs I just might be able to ditch it for good... but I'm digressing from a digression.) So I just manually accept or reject whatever connections it tries to make.
posted by azazello at 10:40 PM on March 10, 2002
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This also makes me curious...I use ZoneAlarm, and don't allow Windows Media Player access to the Internet. Sinse WMP is supossed to send what I watch back to Microsoft, would that stop that snooping?
posted by jmd82 at 8:50 AM on March 9, 2002