More Site Info

[tonynace]

How about some better info on sites when we "shift/click" to find out about a site? It would be nice to know if the site is advertising or is really needed to perform essential functions on the site at a glance.

[Tom T.]

How about some better info on sites when we "shift/click" to find out about a site? It would be nice to know if the site is advertising or is really needed to perform essential functions on the site at a glance.

Try this link, which is Yahoo's list of third-party advertisers -- almost 100 of them.
http://info.yahoo.com/privacy/us/yahoo/ ... tails.html
Block them all, if you like.

You can try visiting the site directly -- with NoScript in complete lockdown mode, i. e., *everything" on NoScript > Options > Embeddings page checked, also Advanced > Untrusted.

For example, if you see quantserve in the list, and try visiting www dot quantserve.com, it will redirect you to Quantcast.

Safer: Look up quantserve in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantserve. It directs to Quantcast, and you'll see some allegations of privacy violations. In any event, it's working to get your information, not to help you or the page.

Similarly, www dot 2o7.net redirects to Omniture.com, and if you look them up in Wikipedia,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omniture

you'll see that it's owned by Adobe, has many data-mining tools, and the Criticism section says:

"Critics have accused Omniture of attempting to hide the fact they are collecting data.[10] Critics claim they do this by sending the information to a domain name that looks and sounds similar to an IP address used to connect to devices on the local network and not the Internet. This has led to speculation that the domain name is used to trick users or firewall rules.[11] Omniture's SiteCatalyst and SearchCenter products use the 2o7.net domain name.[12]

Omniture collects data from Apple[10] and Adobe, who use Omniture to collect usage statistics across their products.[11] It is possible to opt-out of the Omniture data-collection system, and to block the tracking.[12]"

NoScript automatically protects you against some of these by running what's called a Surrogate Script in place of the real one. This makes the page happy, but sends none of your personal information to the data-miners. To see the list of surrogates, type about:config in the Address Bar. Then, in the Filter Bar, type:

surrogate

You'll see some that are abbreviated, and may not be recognizable.

For example: In the Name field: noscript.surrogate.qs.sources.

Not recognizable? Look at the Value field: edge.quantserve.com

So now you know that NoScript is protecting you from Quantserve's data-mining, while still letting the page know that a QS script ran. Just don't ever allow quantserve. Better: mark it as Untrusted, so that it doesn't even show in the list of scripts.

One more possible source of both information and protection is using the HOSTS file that is a part of Windows (and some other operating systems). There are several free services that provide HOSTS files, updated regularly, containing thousands of privacy-invading, annoying, or outright malicious sites, and blocks them automatically. For example,

http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm

currently blocks about 16,000 sites. You can't get to the listed sites even if you try. The site explains how and why this works, but if there's anything you don't understand about the process, feel free to ask here (although of course we can't provide support for any third-party product or service).

Not everyone agrees with using the HOSTS file in this way, so please take this as a personal opinion to be considered, rather than absolute advice, and not with any guarantees or warranties, express or implied. But I've been using it for years. No technical knowledge is required.

Even if you don't use it as a blocking tool, you can just extract the downloaded .zip file and save it somewhere convenient. It will open nicely with Wordpad. The you can search the file for the site in question. (Note: it has *no* file extension. Hence the need to choose a program to open it.)

Big surprise: Omniture, 2o7, and Quantserve/Quantcast are all listed.

So there are a number of ways that you can research a questionable script source. And once you mark one as Untrusted, you never have to research that one again. Soon, very few are showing up any more.

I hope this helps.

[Tom T.]

How about some better info on sites when we "shift/click" to find out about a site? It would be nice to know if the site is advertising or is really needed to perform essential functions on the site at a glance.

You might like to know that your post was part of the inspiration for this sticky (permanent) post, to try to provide some of the info you wanted: Which sites are just ad sites and/or tracking or data-mining sites.

I hope you find it useful.