Tag: firefox

Beat ISP tracking

Posted by – July 23, 2008

Given that New Wave Communications is now looking to track it’s customers. I’m going to show you how to limit the usefulness of the information they can collect. The specific system used by New Wave relies on browser cookies to identify customers. Since cookies are very necessary for a lot of functionality on the web it is not possible to disable cookies completely. However, it is possible limit the lifetime of cookies to a single browser session. Doing this makes tracking via cookies far less useful since the tracking system won’t know from one session to the next that you’re the same person. One side effect that you should be aware of is that if you use cookies to save any website passwords making all cookies session-only would delete them each time you closed the browser.

In Mozilla Firefox 3 it is far more obvious how to do this than in Internet Explorer. I briefly tried looking through IE’s settings but was not successful. The steps are Edit –> Preferences –> Privacy tab then under Cookies you will see “Keep until: <dropdown menu>”. Click on the dropdown menu and select “I close Firefox”. Note that to the right you can click on Exceptions and allow/disallow cookies on a per site basis. For example, if you wanted to stay logged in on a specific site across browser sessions but delete all other cookies.

Session-only cookies in Firefox

Workaround for heavy CPU load in Firefox Beta5

Posted by – May 11, 2008

Gkrellm2 display showing high cpu/disk usage
For the people using Firefox Beta 5 on Linux. You probably noticed a curious bug where Firefox freezes for a moment accompanied by extreme CPU load and disk usage. Well, the problem is that Firefox3′s support for anti-phishing is saved to a SQL-lite database that grows larger than its cache can handle. The fix is to disable the anti-phishing features and delete the files beginning with “urlclassifier” from your profile. After doing this I haven’t had any problems since. The SQL-lite database grows quite large when these problems start occurring, 18 Meg for me.
-rw-r--r-- 1 ebrake ebrake 18M May 11 12:40 ./urlclassifier3.sqlite

BB&T Bank tracking it’s users

Posted by – March 27, 2008

Check out the homepage of Branch Banking and Trust, it’s got invisible tracking voodoo from Doubleclick/Google.

BBT Bank homepage

This is the unadorned BB&T website. No visible external advertising or mention of Doubleclick at all.

Doubleclick uncovered

The first thing you’ll notice is the two warnings displayed by noscript in the upper-left corner. Remember this was supposed to be blank white space. Doubleclick doesn’t appear on other pages and it sure as hell doesn’t appear in the online banking. Just being on the homepage is bad enough because of the enormous database owned by Doubleclick about nearly all Internet users. Through their advertising network Doubleclick can track me from website to website. Then of course they can also identify me when I go to login to my bank. BB&T now has detailed information about it’s customers provided by Doubleclick.

From the BB&T Privacy Notice

BB&T also gives itself permission to share the information it has about me to other companies that do marketing for the bank, i.e. Doubleclick.

In addition, we may disclose the information we collect about you described above to companies that perform marketing services on our behalf and to financial institutions for the purpose of jointly offering financial products and services to you, such as mortgage life insurance.