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http://www.macnn.com/articles/01/03/19/earthlink.tracks/

Earthlink tracks users via "super-cookie"?

updated 08:10 am EST, Mon March 19, 2001

 
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Gibson Research Corporation reports on a persistent, cross-domain, super-cookie that "users of EarthLink's web browser receive an apparently unique and certainly persistent 'tag' which is presented to every web site, web advertiser, and web tracking bug their browser comes into contact with."


by MacNN Staff

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  1. 0

    Joined:

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    03/19, 08:39am | report spam | Reply | delete

    Whoa!

    Hmm. Im Not a Smart Owl But I know what invasion of Privacy is!

    -Owl Boy

  1. 0

    Joined:

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    03/19, 08:56am | report spam | Reply | delete

    Yikes!

    The reference article suggested searching for "ELNSB50", the frontend of the SuperCookie. So I did a Sherlock search. Yikes! Search results follows:



    http://www.cen.uiuc.edu/bstats/latest-week.html

    http://www.ews.uiuc.edu/bstats/latest.html

    http://www.wdksales.com/guestbook.htm

    http://www.kbr16.dial.pipex.com/logfile.shtml

    http://dodn.wroc.pl/rozne.html

    http://www.pbpublishing.com/browsersfull.html

    http://www.barnard.com/browsersfull.html

    http://www.austin-cha-yon-ryu.com/webreports/agents.html

    http://log.pr.co.kr/sori/log.agents.html

    http://www.wjck.org/we.htm

    http://www.reprocess.com/browsersfull.html

    http://www.austin-cha-yon-ryu.com/webreports/agents.html

    http://www.lesko.net/southpark/analog/index.html

    http://cgi.mcs.kent.edu/cgi-bin/users/cstone/IFS/counter/html_log.pl

    http://www.periodically.com/http_user_agent.asp

    http://www.cen.uiuc.edu/bstats/latest.html

    http://www.solar.ifa.hawaii.edu/Admin/browserstats.html

    http://www.thescia.org/logs/log.agents.html

    http://www.epoxy.com/guest_book.htm

    http://www.ews.uiuc.edu/bstats/latest-week.html

    http://escati2.linkopp.net/counter12/141056.html

    http://escati.hypermart.net/counter4/15968.html

    http://www.abbottsoft.com/buglist.htm

    http://escati.hypermart.net/counter8/54794.html

    http://www.prokoparchitects.com/analog/current.html

    http://www.cyberaxxe.com/stat/stat.htm

    http://www2.netconnx.net/Sequoia/guestbook.html

    http://www.johnmellencamp.com/read_jm.html

    http://dcws.org/form_results.html

    http://www.antiquemed.com/guestbook/amgb.html

    http://www.home.tbinet.org/raf/guestlog.htm

    http://www.his.com/userlogs/bandy.html

    http://mdg.com/sites/mdg/4DWS/browserstats.html

    http://www.thescia.org/logs/log.agents.html

    http://www.cen.uiuc.edu/bstats/latest.html

    http://mdg.com/4DWS/browserstats.html

    http://www2.outer.net/prospectsofwealth/webreports/agents.html

    http://www.hoboes.com/html/NetLife/NSpace/Statistics/Yesterday.shtml

  1. 0

    Joined:

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    03/19, 09:04am | report spam | Reply | delete

    GRC Rocks

    I love what GRC is doing and what they stand for. If not for them a lot of web privicy issues would go unannounced.

  1. 0

    Joined:

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    03/19, 12:21pm | report spam | Reply | delete

    Not a big supprise

    That dosen't suprise me, seing as how I have gotten about 20 spam e-mails a day since I signed up for earthlink a couple of years ago and have never sent a single email from the account.

  1. 0

    Joined:

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    03/19, 12:48pm | report spam | Reply | delete

    Hypocrites

    Has anyone seen Earthlink's latest add campaign?

    "The Totally Anonymous Internet" is its constant mantra.

  1. 0

    Joined:

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    03/19, 01:08pm | report spam | Reply | delete

    No Spam for me

    I've never received spam on my earthlink email account, and I've actually used it on occasion.

    Of course, if may mean something that I didn't install the "Earthlink" browser, whatever the h*** that is. (I kind of remember not being able to just install the Earthlink software, a browser had to be installed, but since I already had browsers installed, I just killed 'em when it was done). But since I also did a system re-install recently, I just redid my dial-up and didn't install the earthlink stuff (toolbars, etc.)

  1. 0

    Joined:

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    03/19, 02:59pm | report spam | Reply | delete

    They knew it before I did

    That dosen't suprise me, seing as how I have gotten about 20 spam e-mails a day since I signed up for earthlink a couple of years ago and have never sent a single email from the account.

    I never even knew I -had- an Earthlink mail account, because I've been using a separate e-mail account since before I switched to Earthlink. When I found out Earthlink had assigned me an e-mail account anyway, I checked it found about 500 spams. Earthlink claims that they don't share or sell e-mail addresses, so I guess 500 spammers just got lucky. (And I've never used Earthlink's browser.)

  1. 0

    Joined:

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    03/19, 05:41pm | report spam | Reply | delete

    Idiots...

    Did anyone actually read the referenced article??? For such an "INVASION OF PRIVACY", grc ended up having not too much of a problem with the "cookie."

    And this "cookie" has NOTHING to do with your SPAM!!! My guess is your email account is relatively easy to guess, maybe your first name and last name, followed by a few numbers?? Wow, tricky. Bet is was hard for a Spammer's email-generation software to guess that one. And of course, sending it to the country's #2 ISP was a long shot. (Next thing you're gonna tell me is spammers target AOL users! Never!)

    I just wish MacNN would give a little more of the gist of the article in their summaries, so as to avoid idiotic confusion like this...

  1. 0

    Joined:

    0
    03/19, 07:21pm | report spam | Reply | delete

    Macnn, check the article

    It looks like this page has been updated with info that says that the cookie is innocent, and only stores non trackable info about screen size, bit depth, etc.

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