Re: Firefox security question

On Wed, 08 Feb 2006 19:23:27 -0600, Stephen Sentoff wrote:

On Wed, 08 Feb 2006 18:40:54 -0500, General Schvantzkoph wrote:

On Wed, 08 Feb 2006 14:27:49 -0800, basbryan wrote:

One can identify where you live by your IP... Maybe that is where the
popup got the info?

That's certainly possible in my case because I have a static IP which is
linked to my personal domain name which means that a whois would reveal my
address. However most of the world uses dynamic IPs. Are you saying that
doing a lookup on a dynamic IP supplied by a cable or DSL provider would
reliably provide the name of the town?

It's not perfectly reliable, but there is a good correlation between your
IP address and location. Try out the mapping service from Geobytes:
http://www.geobytes.com/IpLocator.htm

What I'm concerned about is if there is another way that a website can
pull sensitive information off of your system via the browser. Firefox
remembers all sorts of things like phone numbers and addresses and
automatically fills in forms. While this is very convenient it feels
awfully dangerous, you certainly wouldn't want a random website to be able
to grab a credit card number or your social security number without your
having to explicitly submit the form. What's Firefox's mechanism for
protecting information like this?

.