nettime: traces and hounds and big brother

[Luka Frelih <luka@potica.kud-fp.si>]

Hello!

This is a message from a mailing list about a certain web browser,  
pointing out an interesting privacy risk in Netscape 2.0, which is  
often encountered in open distributed computing systems a la today's  
Java & Javascript.

How much should a user know about his tools? How much should his  
tools know about him? I won't go into projections of persons in  
cyberspace trough digital traces but would like to hear opinions  
about opennes of capital-imposed standards like Netscape's  
one-and-only Mozilla browser. How much copyright & non-disclosure  
can Netscape retain over security and other psycho-technical issues  
in its software? And I'm not talking credit cards here.

L

Begin forwarded message:

Date: Mon, 26 Feb 96 17:53:41 -0800
Reply-To: omniweb-l@omnigroup.com
Sender: omniweb-l@omnigroup.com
From: William Shipley <wjs@omnigroup.com>
To: Multiple recipients of list <omniweb-l@omnigroup.com>
Subject: Yet another advantage of OmniWeb over Netscape?
X-Listprocessor-Version: 6.0 -- ListProcessor by Anastasios Kotsikonas
X-Comment: OmniWeb Discussion
X-Organization: Omni Development, Inc.

No security holes!

Begin forwarded message:

From: Lee Campbell <elwin@media.mit.edu>
Date: Mon, 26 Feb 1996 12:24:41 -0500
To: big-phun@media.mit.edu
Subject: fwd: JavaScript in Netscape 2.0 shouldn't let me do this,  
but it does

<Forwarded>

> JavaScript in Netscape 2.0 shouldn't let me do this, but it does
>
> John Robert LoVerso, OSF Research Institute
>
> After you've visited one of my pages, any of my
> JavaScript ought to get scrubbed out of your
> browser's memory. You wouldn't want that code to
> live on, snooping, spying, or stealing?
>
> This is a simple example where I engage some
> JavaScript that runs in a (mostly) hidden window.
> This window persists, and hence, the JavaScript I
> wrote persists. From then on, it wakes up every
> second and sees what page you are viewing. If
> you've changed pages, it reports where you now are
> back to me via a CGI, which saves information like
> this:
>
> (The rest at <http://www.osf.org/~loverso/javascript/track-me.html)


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