Internet Tips: Free Tool Nabs Web Bugs
Stalk and block clear-GIF Web bugs, use IE's P3P to crumble cookies, e-mail long URLs with ease.Scott Spanbauer
You've crushed your cookies. You've munged your e-mail. But still the spam streams into your in-box. Where's it coming from? One threat to privacy that you may not have considered is a little-known Web design trick called the Web bug.
Also known as clear GIFs, Web bugs are tiny, invisible graphic images that Internet marketers and advertisers implant on their Web pages to track which pages are being viewed and by whom.
Web bugs aren't always a threat to your personal privacy--many Web sites, including PCWorld.com, use them simply to monitor site traffic without identifying individual users or IP addresses.
When combined with cookies, customer databases, and other information-gathering methods, however, Web bugs can tell Web-site operators who you are, what sites you visit, and when you visit them. If that's information you'd like to keep to yourself, it's time to start hunting down and exterminating the bugs.
If you use ad- or cookie-blocking software, you may already be able to block Web bugs. Programs such as InterMute's AdSubtract (the SE version is free) and Guidescope's free Guidescope utility offer Web-bug-blocking features. And if your Web browser blocks third-party cookies or supports the P3P security standard, you may already be safe from Web bugs that track your personal browsing.
The Privacy Foundation's free Bugnosis utility flashes a visible or audible ("Uh-oh!") warning when it detects a Web bug in a page you're browsing (see Figure 1). The program is currently available only as an Internet Explorer 5. x add-on, but the forthcoming Outlook and Outlook Express versions of Bugnosis will be able to detect Web bugs in HTML-format e-mail messages, which are the same as Web pages.
You can install Bugnosis in a few minutes, even over the slowest of connections. The Privacy Foundation's FAQ at the Bugnosis page explains more about how Web bugs work, and why you should care.
Send your questions and tips to nettips@spanbauer.com. We pay $50 for published items. Scott Spanbauer is a contributing editor for PC World.
Crush Cookies With IE'S P3P
If you've been paying any attention to Internet privacy, you probably know about cookies--small text files that Web sites put on your hard disk to identify you and perhaps remember your preferences. Cookies have long been reviled as a threat to personal privacy, generating a small industry of cookie-smashing utilities and tips articles for disabling cookies.
While many cookies are benign or helpful, others (like the Web bugs described earlier) can pass your browsing habits, your identity, and even your e-mail address to third-party advertisers and marketers.
The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium--the folks who set many of the Web's standards) is finalizing a standard that will automatically describe a site's privacy practices. The Consortium's P3P (Platform for Privacy Preferences) standard may not yet be final, but Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6 already supports it, as do numerous Web sites (see the W3C's list of the latter). Visit the W3C's pages to find FAQs and other P3P information.
You needn't do anything special to take advantage of P3P in IE 6, which at this writing is due to ship in late October. The browser's default Medium privacy setting blocks all third-party cookies (usually created by advertisements embedded in the current page) from sites that don't have a P3P policy in place, and it blocks any cookies that use personally identifiable information (such as your name or e-mail address) without asking for your permission.
If that's too stringent or not secure enough for you, choose Tools, Internet Options, click the Privacy tab, move the slider up or down until you find a privacy level that suits your needs, and click OK.
It's too soon to tell whether P3P will really protect your online privacy, and whether other browser makers will support it. Netscape Navigator users already can block all third-party cookies (leaving the site's own cookies functional).
In Navigator 4.7 x, choose Edit, Preferences, click Advanced, check Accept only cookies that get sent back to the originating server, and click OK. In Netscape 6 and in the open-source Mozilla browser it's based on, choose Edit, Preferences, select Cookies under 'Privacy and Security', check Enable cookies for the originating web site only, and click OK.
More on E-Mailing URLs
After reading the tip on overcoming problems associated with e-mailing long URLs in the June 2001 Internet Tips column, several readers submitted tips of their own.
Eric Connor offers one of the simplest, noting that no matter how long the URL, Netscape Messenger's subject line can handle it. Internet Explorer seems to do just as well, and I'll bet you'd be hard-pressed to find a URL that's too long for your subject line.
The only drawback: Your recipient's e-mail program probably won't display a URL sent in the subject line as a clickable hyperlink the way that it does URLs included in the body of the message. You may have to explain in the accompanying message that the recipient must copy the URL in the subject line and paste it into the browser's Address field.
Ron Sommer suggests sending messages in Quoted Printable format as another way to preserve long URLs. This format inserts carriage returns at the end of paragraphs but not at the end of lines. In my limited testing, the technique worked like a charm.
To send Quoted Printable messages in Outlook Express, choose Tools, Options, click the Send tab, click the Plain Text Settings button in the Mail Sending Format section (see Figure 2), select Quoted Printable from the 'Encode text using' drop-down list, and then click OK twice. In Outlook 2000, choose Tools, Options, click the Mail Format tab, click the Settings button, select Quoted Printable from the 'Encode text using' drop-down list, and finish by clicking OK twice.
Ronald Edwards says his favorite way to send a URL while browsing in Internet Explorer is to choose File, Send, Link by E-mail. This creates a new message in your default e-mail program that contains both the URL text in the message body and a URL attachment that recipients can click to launch the site if the URL in the message ends up broken.
And Dana Hunter notes that when you drag links from IE's Favorites list and drop them into an Outlook message window, you create a clickable link. There's a drawback to URL attachments, though: They work only in Windows. As a result, Internet purists and users of the Macintosh, Linux, and other operating systems may squawk. You just can't win.
Finally, Loretta Harris offers a way to reconnect broken URLs. First, select the entire broken URL and press Ctrl-C to copy it to the Clipboard. Open Microsoft Word (or the text editor of your choice) and paste the broken URL into a document. Search for paragraph breaks, and replace them with spaces.
To do this in Word 2000, choose Edit, Replace, enter ^pin the 'Find what' field, enter Space in the 'Replace with' field, and click Replace until the cursor has made its way through the fractured link. Now simply copy the reunited URL and paste it into your browser's address field.
Alphabetize Your Browser's Favorites and Bookmarks
As your list of Internet Explorer Favorites grows, IE appends new shortcuts to the end of the list. IE eventually gets around to alphabetizing them for you, but you can hasten the process: Choose Favorites, right-click any item in the list, and select Sort by name. Netscape Navigator offers a similar command. To alphabetize Navigator bookmarks, press Ctrl-B and then choose View, By name (or View, Sorted by name in Netscape 6.1).
Download of the Month: Browser Recorder
Once upon a time, true PC power users did everything with long strings of keystrokes-- Alt-W\N1-Alt-A..., yadda yadda. Before long those repetitive keystroke series began to get in the way, and keystroke-recording-and-playback batch files and utilities soon debuted.
Then along came Windows and the Internet. Now it's just click, click, click, all the livelong day. The increase in secure Web applications that require you to enter user names, passwords, and search criteria creates a need for programs that record and replay on-screen input.
NQL's free Browser Recorder plug-in for Internet Explorer records the clicks, form entries, and other data you enter to log into, navigate, and search a site. Save the recorded session as a link (similar to a bookmark), and play back the entire session with a single click. You can even password-protect sensitive sessions. You can also download the 1.43MB program from the author's page.
