Blue Apples, privacy, and Web Bugs at FR

5/10/2004 | self

[Future Useless Eater]

Blue Apples, privacy, and Web Bugs at FR

Some freepers use a visible graphic or 'icon' on their every post such as one person that uses a "blue apple" from his own home webspace. Icons like that can serve as a 'web-bug' to harvest personal info from freepers.

Now I realize FR doesn't allow java, javascript, vbscript, or active-x content so the risk is lowered. But some of these same freepers are also amatuer programmers with access to detailed webmaster server-access statistics. Those stats can collect the IP addresses, and a number of other environment variables from every computer that accesses a planted 'image'. So its possible for one of them to, let's say 'match-up' your comments here and learn personal details about you that he can abuse in dispicable ways.

I wish the Robinson's would make some type of policy statement at the very least, about web-bugs. Some things I might recommend are:

• enforcing no images smaller than 10x10 unless the image originates from freerepublic.com.
• enforcing all non-FR images to have a 1-pixel 'link' drawn around them in case the image happens to be otherwise invisible, like this
• allowing and encouraging freepers to upload commonly used icons into FR webspace.
• banning of images that appear to be there for cyber-tracking purposes.

Whenever it becomes KNOWN that a freeper you disagree with strongly may be mining his posts with web-bugs, there is a way to block them. For example, all Windows computers have a plain-text 'hosts' file, and you can add entries to that to block graphics from any particular server, (including many advertisement servers by the way!).

On XP computers, that 'hosts' file probably resides at:
  "c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts"
It can be edited with a plain-text editor, and the following sample lines inserted...
(you should do this editing ONLY when your browser is totally shut down)

0.0.0.0     home.hiwaay.net
0.0.0.0     doubleclick.com
0.0.0.0     doubleclick.net
0.0.0.0     ads.doubleclick.net
0.0.0.0     ad.trafficcmp.com
0.0.0.0     popup.msn.com
0.0.0.0     ads.specificpopup.com
0.0.0.0     ads.specificpop.com
0.0.0.0     ads.specificclick.com

The first line will block the blue apple 'icon'. The others will block some of the worst ad-servers or spyware tracking sites. I like to browse my 'cookies' file occasionally, and when I see a server that is setting cookies (or serving popups or annoying ads), add a line to the 'hosts' file to permanently block them.

John Robinson, have you ever discussed or considered web-bugs here at FR?

[Future Useless Eater]

On 2nd thought, I don't believe it is necessary to close
your browser before editing your 'hosts' file.

You just 'might' not always see the benefits of a new 'block'
until the next time you restart the browser,

or press Shift-Reload or shift-refresh
or clear your cache

[Future Useless Eater]

Questions to the management

[Auntie Mame]

Interesting. Never gave those little pictures a thought, but you've got a real good point.

[Future Useless Eater]

This is not meant to be a personal attack, but just a discussion of policy here at FR. I'd like to know the Robinson's feelings on a pracice that has become popularized by one freeper.

And that is, to do EXTENSIVE user-posts history downloading to their home computer, extracting more specific posting patterns from that, and then posting the freeper's handle, along with his detailed pattern on some thread where a heated argument is in progress.

Often the freeper/programmer who does this will post some sort of snide or discouraging remark about the other freeper, related to his posting history, or else others involved with the 'argument' tend to do so.

To the Robinson's: would you say a few words about this practice?
* do you find it abusive of freepers?
* do you find it abusive of the cpu resources here at FR?
* what would happen to bandwidth if EVERYONE started doing this all the time?

thank you. FLE (example follows) ...my emphasis in RED

---

This is your posting profile. It is very unusual when compared to that of other posters. Do you work for a government entity or NGO hostile to individual liberty, and post as part of that job?

The headings are hours from midnight to following 11:59 pm in military time notation. Below each time there are four spaces each representing 15 minute increments (a dot fills each unused slot). The numbers in the each slot are the number of posts in the 15 min period. An exclamation point (!) is in a slot that had more than 9 posts.

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[philman_36]

You will probably be interested in this thread.

[Future Useless Eater]

`

[TOUGH STOUGH]

Interesting. I had no idea such a thing was possible. I look forward to the responses.

[TheSpottedOwl]

Oh just lovely. It's just the thing I would expect from someone of his caliber. God bless and protect Terri and her family.

[pc93]

If you want to make the changes on-line. After making your changes to the hosts file try going to the command prompt
and typing: nbtstat -R and hitting enter.

[T'wit]

To this reader, such icons are a constant annoyance without adding a thing. I'd favor banning them all.

[Politicalmom]

Will basic ad-ware catch these things?

[William Terrell]

Thanks for alerting me.

FL_engineer, since this thread is obviously about me, why didn't you alert me? Did you examine the binary in my little symbol to see if it contained any odd code? It's not very big.

To anyone that is interested, this posted chart is "mined" from information you get when you do a poster search. It takes about 20 minutes to gather a few months of posting by saving each page and putting them together in a single file. It takes patience and time. I don't have the time nor the desire to waste on keeping track of anyone.

It's true, anyone can figure out how to do this, and anyone who can program can figure out how to isolate the date and time from the posts and arrange the data. The posts I made, reproduced here, is for another poster. I also posted my own pattern on the same thread I posted this.

As far as I'm concerned, the notion that my picture is gathering data is absurd. If I were doing that, why would I let be known that I was by publicly announcing it? Probably, it can be done, by FL_engineer, who seems to know how to do it, by not by me. I am (was) a business programmer.

The question highlighted in red in post #5 on this thread, that has the chart, is one asked of the poster in question by a number of people that have debated with him (her). I just went one step farther.

[Graybeard58]

such icons are a constant annoyance without adding a thing. I'd favor banning them all. Ditto from this reader too.

[philman_36]

No problem. You may never have known otherwise.

[William Terrell]

It looks like I wouldn't have. Very odd behavior from compassionate people.

[general_re]

But some of these same freepers are also amatuer programmers with access to detailed webmaster server-access statistics. Those stats can collect the IP addresses, and a number of other environment variables from every computer that accesses a planted 'image'.

On balance, I have to say that W.T.'s explanation of his methodology makes more sense than this - notice that it's a timeline for a posting history, and let's walk though what we'd have to do to produce that by the method you suggest. In order for me to do this, the first thing I have to do is use an icon to capture your IP address, and pray that you're not on dial-up or some other highly variable DHCP connection - I have to tie your handle to an IP address somehow, or else I'm dead in the water, right from the start. Assuming that my prayers are answered, I may be able to grab your IP, but this is not as easy as it sounds. When you first open a thread, you'll grab my image, but so will everyone else, so that doesn't help me in separating you out from the crowd. Nor can I rely on correlating your post times to my logs, necessarily - the first time you open the thread, your browser will download the image and cache it, and when it reloads the page immediately after a post, it's highly likely that it will simply pull the image out of the cache, rather than hitting my server again. Eventually, by following you around fairly closely, and if you have a close-to-static IP, I'll probably be able to get you sooner or later, but it might take some doing.

Now, here's the next problem - in order to do a comprehensive history of your posting habits from then on, I have to track you by planting my icon(s) on every single thread here at FR, otherwise, I won't have any way of knowing from my logs whether you were present on that thread or not. Furthermore, even if I do that, I then have to have some sort of unique identifier on each image, for each individual thread, or I won't know exactly which thread is causing you to download my image, and hence won't know exactly which threads you're interested in.

So now imagine I've planted my bug on every thread, and every time I plant it, I give it a unique identifier for tracking purposes. Even at that point, my problems aren't over - now I have to go through my logs and actually examine each thread you've touched, in order to see if you actually posted, or if you just read the thing.

Now, admittedly, I could script a lot of this, but doesn't it sound like an awful lot of effort, without much in the way of payoff? Wouldn't it be easier to simply walk through a poster's recent posts, and jot down the time of each post?

[Future Useless Eater]

Thanks for helping with the pinging. You beat me by 9 minutes
and I was able to spare him DOUBLE pings...

[Future Useless Eater]

I'm glad you think that cyber-sleuthing people online is too difficult.
That may help convince others not to try it. And I won't bother
correcting you, or pointing out the dastardly things that 'could' be done
because that will only give @ssholes more ideas.

[Future Useless Eater]

I Thought some of you would also be interested in these questions-to-management.

And Roscoe, were you EVEN AWARE that freepers had published
your posting-pattern
published for the purposes of criticizing you?

General questions to all of you,

Do you agree some people could find their posting-patterns put on public display
to be intimidating, or have a chilling effect on them?

Do you agree this sometimes seems to be done to silence their competition?

Do you agree this could be seen as abusive?

or wasteful of F.R.'s CPU time or bandwidth?

[general_re]

And I won't bother correcting you, or pointing out the dastardly things that 'could' be done because that will only give @ssholes more ideas.

Of course you won't. Naturally.

There's nothing you can post that isn't already known by someone else out there, so I think begging off by claiming that you don't want to "give [people] ideas" is absolutely ridiculous. You've accused someone of bugging FR in order to track other posters, and now I think it's time for you to back that accusation up, or withdraw it and apologize. Your choice.

[William Terrell]

Thanks for explaining it. I though the notion of tracking people with .GIF files was crazy, but I don't have the knowledge to pin it down and and defend myself.

[William Terrell]

Did you neglect to mention that I posted my own chart on the same thread that I posted the other?

[general_re]

The real problem in all this would be tying your screen name - or some other sort of online identity - to an IP address. Companies that use web bugs don't bother trying to do that, which makes their task infinitely easier - they just associate activity with the IP address, and build profiles about that address. Yes, I can put an image on this thread, and use my logs to see that users at 127.0.0.1, 127.0.0.2, and 127.0.0.3 loaded this thread, but that doesn't tell me which posters those addresses belong to, nor does it tell me whether the users at those addresses posted to the thread, or simply read it, and I'll bet that there are far more people reading threads than actually post to them.

What would I do with a thread like this, where I might have hundreds of unique IPs reading it, and hence loading my image, but only a dozen or so people actually posting? How do I know which IP belongs to which poster? Eventually I could probably narrow it down, but for the end result, it would be much simpler to simply walk through someone's posting history as you did.

[William Terrell]

Yes, it's simplier to just walk through the posting history, but it's time consuming. I don't bother with it after I saw how much time I used vis s vis the results I got. I challenge a lot of sacred cows on FR. I suspect this is politically motivated since it doesn't seem to make much sense otherwise.

I don't buy the "chilling effect". Perhaps it's "chilling" to those who think they have something to hide. I've had private requests to do the requesters own chart. Too much time and I can't charge for it.

[sweetliberty]

A big part of the fun of FR for me is the gifs and graphics. Of course, the content is key, but the gif and graphic embellishments add interest and fun to posts and enhance the site immmensely. I would hate seeing any of it banned. I am guessing that John could find ways of detecting any malicious script and ousting it and the offending poster without taking away one of the nicer features of FR.

[sweetliberty]

There are a number of FReepers who use icons in their posts. For that matter, it is common practice all over the internet. Also, any FReepers posting history is accessible to any other FReeper. There is nothing abusive about it.

[general_re]

Yes, it's simplier to just walk through the posting history, but it's time consuming. I don't bother with it after I saw how much time I used vis s vis the results I got.

I figured as much. I work with data miners, so this doesn't particularly surprise me, but I think some folks are surprised to discover just what sort of information one can expose if you are motivated enough to assemble it into a useful form - it would be trivial to throw together a perl script that automates everything you did by hand, and I'm sure there are some very clever perl coders who hang out here. However, people don't seem to realize this, and so the immediate assumption is that you must have some devious, underhanded method of gleaning private information, when in fact the information is quite public, and available to anyone who's interested.

[tpaine]

Posted by FL_engineer to cinFLA; Roscoe; robertpaulsen; tpaine
On General Interest (Chat) ^
05/10/2004 11:04:50 AM PDT #20 of 28 ^

I Thought some of you would also be interested in these questions-to-management.
And Roscoe, were you EVEN AWARE that freepers had published your posting-pattern published for the purposes of criticizing you?

Yep, both roscoe & cinfla were well aware of those posts, as I pinged both of them while we were having those discussions..
-- As you must be aware, FL_engineer, -- seeing you based this thread on them.

General questions to all of you, Do you agree some people could find their posting-patterns put on public display to be intimidating, or have a chilling effect on them?

Of course it could, if said posting patterns revealed that they were only posting during business hours, for instance.. Leads one to wonder, at least, - who is paying for their chit-chat habits..

-- I suspect that in many such cases, the public is paying.
Just a hunch of course, based on the fact that most of these 9 to 5 types support bureaucratic institutions .

Do you agree this sometimes seems to be done to silence their competition? Do you agree this could be seen as abusive?

I see it as a form of whistle blowing on cheating public servants, -- But I could be wrong, of course.

or wasteful of F.R.'s CPU time or bandwidth?

Thats what FR is all about, imo, exposing government cheating, fraud & corruption.. You object?

[robertpaulsen]

Maybe someone should ask William Terrell why he did it and what he hoped to gain by doing it.

Then we could all have a good laugh at his answer because, given the targets, I believe it was his intent to be intimidating, to have a chilling effect, and to silence the competition.

This could be seen as abusive and wasteful of F.R.'s CPU time or bandwidth, but that's not for me to decide. I never thought to report it as such. .

[William Terrell]

I did it because it was a challenge and I like programing. I posted the result on you and Mr. cinFLA because they so dramatically differed from mine and a number of others I ran, but didn't post. I also posted mine.

Do you have something to hide? Should someone else had come up with the same program, and posted the results on me, I wouldn't have cared less. Why do you?

[robertpaulsen]

"I posted the result on you and Mr. cinFLA because they so dramatically differed from mine and a number of others I ran,"

Maybe cinFLA will buy that. I don't.

Now, if you would have used your talents to track the many faces of MrLeRoy to compare posting patterns, that program might be useful to the admin mods in helping to keep banned posters off the board. But he's pro-drug legalization, so that's no good.

Something to hide? Me? Well, thanks to you, not any more. Not that you posted anything that wasn't already publicly available (with some effort). But since you brought it up ....

The information I want people to know about me is posted on my Profile page. You'll note that my posting pattern is not there.

Although FR keeps track of all posters, I think you were out of line to selectively single out people with whom you disagree and post that information. Are you the type who tracks down publicly available information on your neighbors (like divorce records) and publish that information in the local newspapers? Hey, it's legal!

Here I thought you were a big believer in freedom and liberty, keeping the government out of our private lives, and here you are, a little Nazi, collecting tiny tidbits of useless information on your fellow posters. What's next? Do you plan on hacking FR to get our e-mail info? Password info?

[John Robinson]

As pointed out in this thread, William didn't use a web bug or underhanded method to gather posting history, that information is readily available on the pages we all see and can be extracted by hand given enough time.

Now, the idea of using a participant's contributions to FreeRepublic against him must be discouraged for the better of the site. A typical goal of a site is to grow participation. Misuse of such data could be detrimental to that goal. And while isolated cases wouldn't have this effect, widespread misuse would.

As for web bugs specifically, they're a problem on any open forum such as FreeRepublic. The best solution is to force all images to be hosted on FR. That means providing disk space and bandwidth for images and securing against several new avenues of attack such a system exposes. Other solutions include blacklisting known offenders--but that isn't secure, it would be better to whitelist know safe sites. I cannot detect when an image is being used as a bug, I would have to assume all images are possibly bugs. Which brings me to an end-user solution:

Block all images. All but maybe WebTV and those stuck with restricted environments allow you to configure the browser to prevent images from being downloaded. And sophisticated browsers are capable of blocking only third party images (those not hosted on the site you are currently reading.)

Other points:

• Third party images don't use FR bandwidth or CPU time. We're merely hosting a link that tells your browser to download an image from some other site. The burden becomes someone else's--so please only link images on sites that explicitly permit such linking (paid hosting sites?) It's costing somebody money.
• Adaware will not catch these things. But a personal firewall probably will. When configuring your firewall, look for something to do with blocking third party images. (Partially related are third party cookies--you should always disable these, there is no good in it.)
• I cannot detect web bugs on FR. All third party images would have to be assumed to be web bugs.
• I personally think apples, sabertooth tigers, snakes, and whatnot decorating posts are distracting. I'm thinking about opening a "header" and "footer" HTML area that will automatically bracket all posts with these personal decorations. (Some people like them, and they do add character to a post.) I would then provide a configuration option to allow others to disable this added fluff.
• Play nice.
• Be happy.

[tpaine]

"-- a little Nazi, collecting tiny tidbits of useless information on your fellow posters."
-rp-

_____________________________________


Totally confused concept paulsen, as is usual for you.

-- As I commented at #29, there are valid uses to such posting info.
Certainly, such info could be MIS-used, in a nazi-like fashion, to fink out a chatting employee to his employers.

-- But to my knowledge, this has only been done once on FR, and IMS, it resulted in a suspension of the texan involved.

[robertpaulsen]

"As I commented at #29, there are valid uses to such posting info."

Your example is valid if you know the identity of the poster, where he works, etc.

On FR the information is, as I said, useless.

[tpaine]

I personally think apples, sabertooth tigers, snakes, and whatnot decorating posts are distracting.

Ditto.

I'm thinking about opening a "header" and "footer" HTML area that will automatically bracket all posts with these personal decorations. (Some people like them, and they do add character to a post.) I would then provide a configuration option to allow others to disable this added fluff.

I'm for that, bigtime..

Play nice. Be happy.

Ahh, but its hard to be happy if you gotta play nice all the time.

When are you going to put in a bozo feature for all the Pollyanna's, John? -- They could filter out everyone/anything 'unpleasant', and leave the rest of us to our fun.

[Constitutionalist Conservative]

I personally think apples, sabertooth tigers, snakes, and whatnot decorating posts are distracting. I'm thinking about opening a "header" and "footer" HTML area that will automatically bracket all posts with these personal decorations. (Some people like them, and they do add character to a post.) I would then provide a configuration option to allow others to disable this added fluff.

I like this idea.

[tpaine]

Which proves my point, not yours..

[sharktrager]

I personally think apples, sabertooth tigers, snakes, and whatnot decorating posts are distracting. I'm thinking about opening a "header" and "footer" HTML area that will automatically bracket all posts with these personal decorations. (Some people like them, and they do add character to a post.) I would then provide a configuration option to allow others to disable this added fluff.

Personally, I think that you have given room for a signature, and a place for a profile, and that that allows enough room for creativity and expression. If I want to see someone's creative side, I'll check their profile.

Additionally, I don't understand why anyone feels the need to place their nick at the end of their post, since that is automatically put on the post.

[tacticalogic]

Doesn't Cinfla claim to have a program that does the same thing, only better, and pre-dates yours?

[tpaine]

tacticalogic wrote:

Doesn't Cinfla claim to have a program that does the same thing, only better, and pre-dates yours?

______________________________________


Cinfla is well known to claim ANYthing, just for effect.

But the point does have legs, considering this threads basic obvious hypocrisy.

[Libertina]

Play nice. Be happy. LOLOL

[William Terrell]

If you have dark suspicions of the many faces of MrLeRoy, then don't you request that I run charts of those names you think are reincarnations of him? Will be happy to email them to you.

If you don't, why do you mention it?

If the information is useless, why do you worry about it?

Paranoia ill becomes you, my friend, especially ill thought out paranoia.

[William Terrell]

He says I got the idea from him, and his is better. Do you reckon that if he had posted the output from his FL_engineer would have gone off the deep end with him?

[tacticalogic]

If he claims you got the idea from him, he must have posted something for you to get the idea from. Unless you have some kind of miraculous psychic idea-stealing abilities.

[Sabertooth]

I personally think apples, sabertooth tigers, snakes, and whatnot decorating posts are distracting. I'm thinking about opening a "header" and "footer" HTML area that will automatically bracket all posts with these personal decorations. (Some people like them, and they do add character to a post.) I would then provide a configuration option to allow others to disable this added fluff.

Eh. To each their own.

I like avatars, and wish more on FR had them. Makes scrolling through posts, many of them fluffy and graphic-free, much easier.

It's no longer a DOS-based world, after all. Graphics are everywhere because they're more intuitive.

How about some software where I can create my own icons for posters who lack them? Now that would be fun.

[tpaine]

One of the problems I have with your cat pic on the side, tooth..

-- It makes rest of your reply string out less than the width of a newspaper column.

Distracting, and hard to read, imo.

[Sabertooth]

-- It makes rest of your reply string out less than the width of a newspaper column.

One other person has mentioned that problem. Not sure why that is, as I have the HTML for the text set at 600 pixels, which should span about as wide as the text on an 8 x 11 sheet of paper. At the time I asked a few folks to check some posts, and all saw them as I posted them.

I've got five different browsers on my Mac and my posts show up at 600 wide on each of them. Maybe there's something going on with your browser settings? I dunno.

[supercat]

All but maybe WebTV and those stuck with restricted environments allow you to configure the browser to prevent images from being downloaded. And sophisticated browsers are capable of blocking only third party images (those not hosted on the site you are currently reading.)

A better option, though I don't know which programs support it (IE in its default configuration does not) would be to eliminate most of the data from third-party GET requests (including the Referer: field and some bits of the last update time) except for sites to which the user authorized the transmission of such information. I don't want to go into a level of detail that would give anyone ideas, but someone who planted a web bug could easily identify the IP associated with any particular user (unless such blocking software was in use) and determine whenever that user viewed a 'tagged' post, even if the user changed IP addresses).

[Future Useless Eater]

>>All third party images would have to be assumed to be web bugs

Thank you John, for your recognition and acknowledgement that all 3rd party images could be potential 'web-bugs'. I'm glad you are aware of this and no doubt will be watchful for it's abuse.

You and Jim run a great discussion site for Conservatives, and I'm happy to support you.

As for the completely separate, 2nd issue:

[robertpaulsen ->post 30...]
...I believe it was his intent to be intimidating,
to have a chilling effect, and to silence the competition.
This could be seen as abusive and wasteful of F.R.'s CPU time or bandwidth...
[...and post 32...]
The information I want people to know about me is posted on my Profile page.
You'll note that my posting pattern is not there.

Although FR keeps track of all posters, I think you were out of line
to selectively single out people with whom you disagree and post
that information. Are you the type who tracks down publicly available
information on your neighbors (like divorce records) and publish that
information in the local newspapers? Hey, it's legal!

Thank you also Robert, for confirmation from another freeper, that those unrequested compilations, and surprise postings of other freepers' detailed posting-patterns feels abusive. I further felt it was a bullying and intimidating tactic EVEN to OTHERS who hadn't YET posted, but wanted to.

I find it ironic that the dishonest "legalize-all-drugs" crowd, for lack of a better title, are saying [Oh, those charts take so long, 20 minutes to generate, and they're not worth the effort ] but meanwhile they are giddy when one of their charts seems to show something potentially damaging of one of their critics.

And all the while they KNOW they've been soliciting help (posts 948, 949, 1015, 1016) for automating that task, to make it more simple and quick for them. Up until today, they didn't know how, but with the new tips, that's now their next challenge.

>> ...using a participant's contributions to FreeRepublic against him must be discouraged for the better of the site. A typical goal of a site is to grow participation. Misuse of such data could be detrimental to that goal.

I appreciate and read John's remarks in post 33 as allowing for an 'abuse-button-offense' if those unrequested compilations of other peoples' posting-patterns continues.
Otherwise, John may end up having to reprogram the F.R site to take coutermeasures like stripping-out the time-of-day timestamps from all posts older than a day or so.

Thank you everyone, for helping to keep F.R. the Number ONE Conservative forum!