RE: alexa - google toolbar behaviour

["Mehmet Buyukozer" <mbuyukozer () gmx co uk>]

Answers are inline


-----Original Message-----
From: Times Enemy [mailto:times () krr org] 
Sent: Thursday, July 14, 2005 9:11 PM
To: Mehmet Buyukozer
Cc: security-basics () securityfocus com
Subject: Re: alexa - google toolbar behaviour

> Greetings.

Greeting Times, thank you for replying.

> Isn't Alexa spyware, or somehow related to spyware?  I remember they 
> used to have some sort of issue that caused me to ban them from systems.

Actually I did not know Alexa is placed in spyware category, it seemed
innocent to me when I read their aim in their website.


> I have not tried this of late, but not too long ago, it used to be 
> possible to tweak what the browser was claiming.  There even used to be 
> "tools" that did this, however they were probably in cahoots with Alexa, 
> and ... oh wait, i already mentioned what i think about them.

I'll be glad if you can give some example for these tools.

> Regarding google as spyware ... hehe, that is a very interesting 
> statement.  Sure they could be lying, but i am dubious this is the 
> case.  Their shareholders would not be happy, nor would i.

It might not be in spyware category but what makes a software spyware? It
will send information to you and your activities on the net right? So what
makes google toolbar different in this perspective? As I sent in my previous
mail, it is sending all your url's to google including your phpmyadmin and
control panel addresses!

> How did you think that the google toolbar would be able to conduct a 
> search, and do other things like display page rank information?

Yes I agree with you, best way to get the information is letting users to
use your toolbar and get that information. But as I said before, these urls
include your administrative pages, control panels and configuratin pages. So
it seems to me that google knows everything, and uses some of them for page
ranking.

> Why would you voluntarily install spyware, if you believe it to be 
> such?  If you do not like it, uninstall it.

I uninstalled them after I sent mail.

> I am still trying to figure out if you were just trolling this list or 
> otherwise.  Either way, you should probably be more concerned with 
> Alexa, or the www.realist.gen.tr link which you are using on your site, 
> than Google.

I am not trying to trol this list, I had a query in mind and asked it. For
realist thing, sharing your web site statistics is more different than
sharing your surf activities. You are right about your doubts, cause that
site is collecting nearly everthing about visitor but it is giving very good
reports. I choose them for that. I would like to hear what you thinking
about such websites and toplists.

Best regards.

Mehmet
www.sonofnights.com


Mehmet Buyukozer wrote:

> Hi All
>
> Lately, I saw several webserver statistics showing exact number of browsers
> and operating system's that the visitors using so decided to analyze what
my
> browsers (IE, Opera, Mozilla) are sending to webservers. I was using google
> toolbar and alexa toolbar addons on IE and when I checked what IE sending
as
> User-Agent, I saw the result in below. It might seem normal that Alexa adds
> its print to IE's agent properties but I already disabled from "Add-on
> Management" . And also another thing is www.k2pdf.com has anybody idea what
> this comes from? Is there a way of hacking these headers from registry or
> somewhere else?
>
> Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; www.k2pdf.com; SV1; .NET
> CLR 1.1.4322; Alexa Toolbar)
>
>
> Another thing, as I already accepted the legal issues for google toolbar as
> spyware, I was not expecting such a behaviour.
>
> It sends all your surf information to google.
>
> An example for this:
> http://toolbarqueries.google.com/search?client=navclient-auto&googleip=O;13
0
> 2&ch=62317384429&iqrn=3neB&orig=0H8Hr&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&features=Rank:FVN&q
=
> info:http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Esonofnights%2Ecom%2F
>
> Regards
>
> Mehmet
>
> www.sonofnights.com
>