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Ffx often tries to connect to informaction.com
Posted: Tue May 03, 2011 11:43 pm
by kramdenson
Do you know why Firefox 4 attempts to connect to secure.informaction.com?
It happens on almost every browser session and more frequently than in the past.
All I could find on the forums about this was something regarding router/WAN/LAN (spoofing protection?) but didn't really understand that and I don't think this applies to me.
Just wanted to make sure NoScript wasn't constantly "phoning home".
Thanks in advance for any clarification offered about this.
Re: Ffx often tries to connect to informaction.com
Posted: Wed May 04, 2011 7:07 am
by dhouwn
kramdenson wrote:didn't really understand that and I don't think
Unless you deactivated this particular feature NoScript will try to get your WAN IP. It does not know upfront whether your router has the security hole NoScript is trying to prevent from being exploited.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/noscript/privacy/ wrote:NoScript 2.0rc5 and above extends its protection against DNS rebinding to those attacks which specifically target your router's external (WAN) IP address. In order to protect it, NoScript needs to detect the WAN IP currently exposed to internet web sites by your HTTP requests: for this purpose, NoScript sends a completely anonymous query to the
https://secure.informaction.com/ipecho web service, which provides back this information on a secure channel, typically once a day. Again, no data except the aforementioned WAN IP address travels on the secure channel, and no user data at all is collected, nor stored, nor shared nor reused by InformAction or any other party.
This feature, enabled by default, can be disabled by unchecking "NoScript Options|Advanced|ABE|WAN IP ∈ LOCAL".
Re: Ffx often tries to connect to informaction.com
Posted: Wed May 04, 2011 9:33 am
by kramdenson
Thank you, dhouwn, for the informative reply.
Now going to research "DNS rebinding" . Hope wikipedia, wilder's, etc. has some good info on this. Pretty fascinating.
Re: Ffx often tries to connect to informaction.com
Posted: Wed May 04, 2011 2:48 pm
by dhouwn
If you want to know whether your router has the issue simply navigate to your external IP like you would navigate to your router configuration menu, ie: if your external IP were 192.0.32.10 then go to
http://192.0.32.10/ from inside your LAN and see if your router configuration page pops up, if it does, well, then your router firmware is crap.
Re: Ffx often tries to connect to informaction.com
Posted: Wed May 04, 2011 10:20 pm
by kramdenson
Thanks again - so if Ffx cannot connect to my external IP address then there would be no need to enable this preference?