On a Thursday, dark and dreary, I pondered weak and weary
“Flock’s Favorite’s Manger is eternally slow, oh deary”
And I thought and thought
But my thoughts were for naught
until I to myself I did say
I’ll figure this out, come what may
It is contacting someplace , I thought on intuition
And this thought did, in fact, come to fruition
Into my root console I did type tcpdump -i eth0 port 80
To see if the browser is doing something naughty
The Tell Tale console spilled the browser’s sins forever more:
tcpdump: verbose output suppressed, use -v or -vv for full protocol decode
listening on eth0, link-type EN10MB (Ethernet), capture size 96 bytes
23:51:14.278812 IP 89464-www5.cedar.flock.com.www > 192.168.0.22.60802: F 746684168:746684168(0) ack 3241799097 win 6624
23:51:14.319144 IP 192.168.0.22.60802 > 89464-www5.cedar.flock.com.www: . ack 1 win 6432
23:51:18.267828 IP 192.168.0.22.60802 > 89464-www5.cedar.flock.com.www: F 1:1(0) ack 1 win 6432
23:51:18.324766 IP 89464-www5.cedar.flock.com.www > 192.168.0.22.60802: . ack 2 win 6624
You see, to home it is phoning
When you do Favorites Managing
Wow, I’ve never seen such technical poetry before.
Comment by bob — August 3, 2006 @ 3:53 pm |
[...] The Tell Tale Browser or Is Flock Spyware? « Douglas’ Digital Domain [...]
Pingback by Untitled « Chris Vance: Blog — September 11, 2006 @ 3:33 am |
Hey Douglas, don’t worry – Flock isn’t spyware. We all hate spyware. Here’s some info, from our privacy policy that should explain what you’re seeing there
“Like other browsers, Flock collects limited, non-personally identifying information that your browser makes available whenever you visit a web site (such as your Internet Protocol address, browser type, browser language, the date and time of your query, and build ID). The Flock browser also includes an update feature that checks our servers on a daily basis to ensure that you are running the latest version of our browser. This helps us ensure that you are running the most stable, secure and feature-rich version of the Flock browser. No personally-identifiable information is transmitted to our servers during this process. The auto-update feature can be disabled in our preferences menu.”
Cheers,
Will Pate
Community Ambassador, Flock
Comment by Will Pate — September 11, 2006 @ 5:12 pm |
Hello, Really cool information…Thankyou!!!!
absolute pleasure to read it, instead of reading
all that crap which is floating about on blogs.
Looking forward to more posts from you…….
Comment by Technology — October 20, 2006 @ 8:26 am |
but your IP address *IS* personally identifiable
Comment by skippy — June 29, 2007 @ 6:25 pm |
Skippy, not like you probably think. Nearly everyone has a dynamic IP address, which means their IP is different every time they reconnect. My sister is a manager at an ISP and she tells me of the callers that say “You ownthis IP range! Tell me who the person with IP (whatever) is!” and There’s not really a why to know, hence RIAA trying to sue people that have never downloaded music. It’s not impossible to personally identify the user with a certain IP, but not as easy as you think.
Comment by douglasr — November 10, 2007 @ 3:13 pm |
if I have a dynamic ip address “which is supposed to mean it changes every time i log on” then why has my ip addy been the same for the last 3 months? why then, if ip addresses change every time someone logs on, is wikipedia able to effectively block someone from editing their site based on the IP address of their computer?
I think you may be mistaken. DSL users are able to change their ip address at a whim, however cable customers find it nearly impossible to change their ip addresses at all…
I think you may need to do some more research on the intricacies of networking. Your IP Address (assigned by comcast) is identifiable (all you have to do is do a whois – ip address) you will find that if you talk to a supervisor at comcast, they will tell you that “you can match the ip address up with the mac address it is assigned to and then pull the customer’s information right down here and see that 145.32.65.14 is John Jimmy, and he lives a 1224 Hathaway Place, Mytown, MI.
Comment by me — July 17, 2008 @ 7:11 pm |
aaaaand if ip addresses are not identifiable how is google able to serve location based ads? how is anysite on the internet able to give you “people who want to date in yourtown, yourstate”
Comment by me — July 17, 2008 @ 7:13 pm |