SeanM wrote:I had been narrowly allowing "recaptcha", either by a "temporary" or a narrow "xyz.recaptcha.net" at a few sites. I am pleased that "recaptcha.net" is considered safe.
http://recaptcha.net/aboutus.html
reCAPTCHA started as a project of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University
It's a very worthwhile project. In addition to preventing spambots from posting, every time you solve a recaptcha, you are helping to transcribe books onto the Internet, whereas OCRs (Optical Character Readers) still can't match the accuracy of humans.
FWIW, they also offer their service to individual users, so that you can post your email address without the spambots harvesting it.
http://mailhide.recaptcha.net/
You enter your email address and they give you your own private code to copy/paste and save in any text document. When you wish to post your email address, you copy and paste the code into the site. No programming knowledge is required. Users who want to email you will click the link provided, then will have to solve the two recaptchas before being able to see your full email address.
Note: This works only at sites that allow users to post HTML code. Most sites that allow instant posting, like this one, don't allow HTML for safety purposes, and use the safer BBCode instead. But at forums like this one, you can be PMd anyway, so it's not so necessary. HTML is more likely to be allowed at sites where posts are moderated, i. e., reviewed by moderators for undesirable content before being published.
SeanM wrote: There are a other common "service" (for lack of a better term) sites popping up (no pun intended), such as "addthis.com" (usually in the narrower form "xn.addthis.com"). McAfee's "SiteAdvisor" and WOT ("Web-of-Trust") each clear "addthis.com".
Is it prudent to accept the McAfee and/or WOT recommendations when setting permission(s) in NoScript ? The alternative might be constantly "going to the well" for an NS recommendation.
Please see
http://forums.informaction.com/viewtopi ... 565#p13565 for some thoughts on that issue.
Addthis is a sharing tool.
http://www.addthis.com/features Whether you want to do that is up to you, but it would hardly seem necessary to allow it to make a site work.
There is also some privacy lost -- see their privacy policy. And from their site:
check out a short list of organizations below that use AddThis to promote sharing, including The White House, FBI and British Monarchy.
That's enough to scare me off, but then, I scare easily when it comes to privacy.
