IP: 10 cents a shot -- I [HE] was auto-outed by an IMG tag in HTML

[Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

Date: Sat, 21 Feb 1998 08:06:44 -0800
To: farber () cis upenn edu
From: Dave Crocker <dcrocker () brandenburg com>


Dave,


There is a less hostile, but rather insidious, aspect to active messages. A
friend set me a message that had a fancy java "signature".  Flashed his
picture, popped up various pieces of address information, etc.  All quite
impressive.  Much later I discovered that every time I looked at the
message, it made an Internet connection over to a server that re-supplied a
copy of the program. 


It happens that I get charged for making Internet connections.  Hence the
scaling effect of having more people start using these fancy features is
non-trivial. Imagine getting charged 5-10 cents every time you look at most
messages.


d/
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dave Crocker                           +1 408 246 8253, (f) +1 408 249 6205
Brandenburg Consulting                             dcrocker () brandenburg com
675 Spruce Drive, Sunnyvale, CA 94086 USA               www.brandenburg.com




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