Hi Folks, Sam,
Samuel W. Heywood wrote:
> It has always been my understanding that viewing a webpage having JavaScript,
> and with JavaScript enabled on a browser capable of interpreting it, can do
> no damage to your computer and cannot cause any of your personal data to be
> compromised, unless your computer is infested with certain types of "spyware"
> programs.
At one stage I used a "free" hit counter on one of my web pages, from
a website that has since gone belly-up. It used javascript on each and
every browser that loaded that web page, and I was able to access most
(I hope) but not all (almost certainly) of the data it gleaned.
I learned a huge amount of detail on each and every browser/surfer
that visited, what browser, what OS, what CPU, the users domain (home
base), which page referred them to my site, date and time of each visit,
and so on.
The only visitors that didn't supply this detail were marked in the
stats report as "no java". I am sure this was shorthand for "no
javascript", because at that time very few browsers could handle JAVA,
but javascript was enabled in a Netscape I used, and I was identified
in my own visits to my website. This was over three years ago.
So, javascript may not be as benign and non-invasive as one might
think.
I still have one "free" hit counter on one of my pages. It almost
certainly uses javascript to interrogate visitors browsers - I got it
from a Microsoft-owned website. It is from BCENTRAL LinkExchange.
PLEA: Does anyone have a self-contained, "place it in a subdirectory",
script for a webpage hitcounter that just counts hits. One that is able
to count Arachne/Bobcat/Net-Tamer etc., as well as the others ?
That doesn't rely on the ISP's server to run ?
I have never been able to understand how to set one up.
And there are more "spyware" programs available as free downloads for
W9x than you think. My wife (W95) is forever weeding them out from stuff
she downloads to try out.
Another reason why I use Arachne almost exclusively on the net.
Regards,
Ron
Ron Clarke http://homepages.valylink.net.au/~ausreg/music.html
-- This mail was written by user of Arachne, the Versatile Internet Client
