Re: Beginner question: monitoring of visitor-actions on a webpage

From: Juha Laiho (Juha.Laiho@iki.fi)
Date: 04/27/02 

From: Juha Laiho <Juha.Laiho@iki.fi>
Date: Sat, 27 Apr 2002 09:47:01 GMT

chris@nospam.com said:
>On Fri, 26 Apr 2002 20:14:34 GMT, Barry Margolin <barmar@genuity.net>
>wrote:
>>In article <ea1f3d55.0204261205.1cc14476@posting.google.com>,
>>Anke Weissenborn <ankeweissenborn@web.de> wrote:
>>>Is it possible to record what a visitor to a webpage is doing with the
>>>contents of the page he/she is viewing, esp. if the web-page visitor
>>>is saving the contents of the web page with the "save as" function
>>>(explorer) as an html file?
>>
>>No. The server just sends the data to the browser; there's nothing in the
>>HTTP protocol that allows the browser to describe what it will be doing
>>with it (displaying versus saving).
>
>Although you might be able to parse to logs to see if the page is sent
>twice - viewed and then saved.

It might well be that the browser doesn't re-request the data; it already
has all it wants to save, so there's no reason for the second transfer.
And even if the browser did another request, it might well be fulfilled
by caches between the server and browser.

Of course, it is possible to at least request the caches and browsers not
to cache a page, but that'll deliberately slow down the service from
the end-user point of view and also increase load on the server (and
on the network connections).

>I've seen a few sites that use javascript to prevent the user from
>right-clicking to get the context menu to choose save as. Of course
>disabling java gets around that.

.. disabling javascript, not java. And if there's a page that requires
javascript to work, and does disable the save button, it isn't that
hard to build a personal proxy to save all transferred content and
look at the page source from there.

So, if you don't want to give the possibility for someone to make a copy
of your web page, just take the page off the web. The obvious downside
here being that they cannot even look at the page if you do this. If you
let someone to look at the page, then they'll also be able to save it. 

-- 
Wolf  a.k.a.  Juha Laiho     Espoo, Finland
(GC 3.0) GIT d- s+: a C++ ULSH++++$ P++@ L+++ E- W+$@ N++ !K w !O !M V
         PS(+) PE Y+ PGP(+) t- 5 !X R !tv b+ !DI D G e+ h---- r+++ y++++
"...cancel my subscription to the resurrection!" (Jim Morrison)

Quantcast