Zone Alarm 3.0 Some Bad News for web sites !
From: Fox (fox@connexions.net)Date: 03/15/02
- Next message: ThePsyko: "Re: proxy"
- Previous message: ThePsyko: "Re: Netopia router- Telnet attacks"
- Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] [ attachment ]
From: "Fox" <fox@connexions.net> Date: Thu, 14 Mar 2002 23:37:39 GMT
I believe we all have a problem !
Zone Alarm 3.0 shuts down browser header field "REFERER" by default.
For those who do not know what this is, it is the bit of code sent to the
website you are visiting, which tells that site which site you were on when
you clicked to go to their site. Touted as a privacy issue, it really is not
at all a privacy issue. It does not tell anyone who you are. But it does
supply important info which makes the web world work as it does.
This information is used in various ways, the two most common ways
follow. First, this info can tell a website which is dependant on it, just
which page or set of navigation menus to display for you. It can
also tell a framed site whether to deliver the entire framed environment
if you are coming from another site, or to just give you a single page
within the frames if you are coming from already being on the site.
This is one of the ways my client's sites uses this field. The second
and most important need for this field, is that this tells a web site
manager where the traffic comes from. The entire infrastructure regarding
traffic flow and development is destroyed by the loss of this field.
Businesses as well as educational as well as personal and even
public service sites all depend on knwoing where their traffic comes
from som they can manage their resources (time and/or money)
in the best way to develop or improve their traffic. This also protect
the web site owner from paying unscrupulous characters for traffic
they do not deliver. All in all this should default to off rather than on.
If you agree, please help stop what may quickly become a trend
which will hurt web sites in a number of ways. Let me reiterate
that this is a false issue which is and will be sold as a privacy issue
when it really has no effect on privacy. It merely tells the next
web site which web site you found their link on. If you type a
link in manually, this field does not exist in that session since there
is no referring site. It does not tell the last site you were at unless
you clicked on the next site from there.
If you agree with the need to stop the blocking of this field
please email Zone Alarm and any others who may be inclined
to follow this example. If no one is heard from, I would expect
that Microsoft will probably end up defaulting to ON also. Please
don't let yet another false concept interfere with the free development
of the WEB.
NOTE ALSO THAT WORK-A-ROUNDS such as queries, will not replace this loss
other than in same site navigation, since search engines will not index
pages with queries.
I am a privacy advocate, so if anyone stands on a soapbox against this
without some more knowledge than I have, you will quickly be known to be
just a crank. So if I am wrong, please bring up some facts and not just
flames. I will surely listen. I have people's best interest at heart here.
If you have the upgrade installed and you go to a web site which starts
showing frames within frames, and you want it to stop doing that, set your
MSIE program privacy to OFF.
Regards to all,
Fox
- Next message: ThePsyko: "Re: proxy"
- Previous message: ThePsyko: "Re: Netopia router- Telnet attacks"
- Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] [ attachment ]
Relevant Pages
|
|
