Posted on 09/10/2003 6:19:05 AM PDT by grumple
So there I was....diggin' into my new laptop....and noticing all the little annoying nuances that have populated my home and download directories...when I came across a couple plugin_trace files. I narrowed these down to Java creations possibly generated by browser errors (primarily netscape).
So I google'd "java plugin trace and came across the following discussion which can be found here http://answers.google.com/answers/main?cmd=threadview&id=226851 .
The one post that struck me as odd was this one, however:
(snip) The above re-assuring comments are incorrect. I too found these files appearing on my hard drive and they are indeed generated by Sun Java, however they are not merely for internal consumption. I peeked inside with a hex editor and found the following:
Using JRE version 1.4.1_02 Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM User home directory = H:\Documents and Settings\(My username was here!!!!!)
Proxy Configuration: No proxy
----------------------------------------------------
c: clear console window
f: finalize objects on finalization queue
g: garbage collect
h: display this help message
l: dump classloader list
m: print memory usage
o: trigger logging
p: reload proxy configuration
q: hide console
r: reload policy configuration
s: dump system properties
t: dump thread list
v: dump thread stack
x: clear classloader cache
0-5: set trace level to
----------------------------------------------------
----------- RedSheriff Measurement -----------
Privacy: http://www.redsheriff.com/privacy.htm
Record Sent
As you can see, a record was sent from my computer, without my being made aware of it, to Red Sheriff - a data mining company based in New Zealand, in cahoots with several big names. I suggest you have a look at their web site.
This plug-in trace is therefore a cookie of sorts, but mediated through Java, so I don't know if it will be blocked or even picked up by ordinary cookie detectors.(/snip)
Me again -
Record sent??
Now I'm not the most computer savvy person. I'm a mainframer and a midlevel functional pc guy...but I know enough to know that I didn't authorize this invasion of privacy, if in fact my web activity is being transmitted to a data mining firm called Red Sherriff.
Anyone know anything about this company? I stopped by their website and it looks like your typical marketing firm, but why am I having trace activity sent to it?
Or is my tin foil hat on crooked this morning?
If you really want to be safe, uninstall windows and go with a different OS, or better yet just go Mac and never go back.
This is a good point. Apple OS X is essentially BSD Unix with a very nice interface, thanks to Steve Jobs and the NeXT way of thinking he brought back to Apple.
But, if one is doing garden variety computing getting a mainstream Linux distribution (Red Hat, SuSE, Mandrake) will do the job and the hardware is one heck of a lot cheaper than the Apple solution. To my knowledge, OS X doesn't run on Intel hardware (Darwin does, I think but there's no interface) while Linux does.
But if there are some apps that you must have and they are Windows, get a copy of VMWare and run it on a Linux system.
Voila, problem solved. Have a nice day.
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