[lit-ideas] more on spyware

Those wishing to learn about the spectrum of issues related to spyware and 
adware may consult the Electronic Frontier Foundation's massive site at 
http://www.eff.org/ which can be overwhelming. A good place to start is 
http://www.eff.org/Privacy/eff_privacy_top_12.html.
For a visual demonstration of web bugs, try loading free bugnosis into your 
IE browser at http://www.bugnosis.org/. Web bugs are a special class of 
electronic spies smaller than a period [ . ] in some cases, written directly 
into web 
pages. They load when you load the page in your browser. However, bugnosis 
uses heuristics to detect a lot of them. If you load bugnosis, go to a "news" 
site like CNN and watch the machine spark up as it detects the web spies.

Not that any of these web bugs are a big threat compared to faults in Windows 
code or existing gateways deliberately built into chips themselves.  

Plus a lot of consumer electronics have spies built right into them. Several 
brands of recent portable CD players, for example, have GPS-enabled chips in 
them which the manufacturer installed to find out where their products were 
being purchased and distributed. So these firms know exactly where all their 
crummy CD players are--and did they even hint at the fact they were tracking 
them 
for marketing purposes? Did they feel obligated to disclose their monitoring 
to their customers? Guess. The GPS chips were discovered by accident during an 
attempted repair and under pressure the companies fessed up to bugging their 
products. 

One can imagine how transparent people's lives will be in 100 years. Privacy? 
How quaint!

Eric


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