By the way, now’s probably a good time to update your hosts file
The hosts file is a long list of known advertising and spyware domains. Using the hosts file makes these sites invisible to your computer.
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1/18/2006
Sometimes it hurts to be right.
‘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.’
http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/06/01/18/1427212.shtml
‘I’m sure this may raise some eye-brows among privacy conscious folks, but please know that this change is being considered with the utmost regard for user privacy. The point of this feature is to enable link tracking mechanisms commonly employed on the web to get out of the critical path and thereby reduce the time required for users to see the page they clicked on. Many websites will employ redirects to have all link clicks on their site first go back to them so they can know what you are doing and then redirect your browser to the site you thought you were going to. The net result is that you end up waiting for the redirect to occur before your browser even begins to load the site that you want to go to. This can have a significant impact on page load performance.’
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/darin/archives/009594.html
Oh, well, that makes it all okay then. It’s for the user experience.
Where does Darin’s next paycheck come from? Oh, right. It’s Google. But I’m sure they have only our best interests at heart.
