A new "Crisis" to fear... It kills many...

[Power Wagon]

Read about it here.



www.dhmo.org

 

[HDH]

LOL!!!. XXX? Oh No!



This post censored to protect the humor

 

[Papa Joe]

Just as bad as Hydrogen Hydroxide. Bad news !!

 

[klenger]

I heard about this one before. I am most upset about it. Please spread the word about this dangerous compound.



I heard one time that 95% of the people who died in the US last year drank Cool Aid at some time in their life. This reckleness has got to stop.



Ken Lenger

 

[MGC]

In our trucks???

After reading this disturbing info I did some checking and found out that due to lack of EPA regulations in Mexico the Saltillo plant is permitted to use DHMO in the cooling system of Cummins powered trucks because of the need for increased cooling of the powerful engines!! If you are concerned for your saftey I will gladly take your truck free of charge to minimize your risk of coming in contact with this substance.

 

[illflem]

no kidding

Ad-aware detected two new spy ware programs on my computer after visiting that site. Download Ad-aware www.lavasoftUSA.com

 

[klenger]

illflem



Could you elaborate on this please?

 

[illflem]

Ken, go to the site I linked to and you can read all about spy ware and how to remove it. Spy ware is mainly an advertiser's way of reading who you are and what you're into for advertising to select persons. Who knows for what other purposes information about you may be used. The first time I ran Ad-aware it found 76 spy programs on my computer which I deleted. After becoming aware of spy ware I have found that when I go to a website that is loading me up that I can tell just by the sounds my computer is making. I noticed that with the DHMO site so ran ad-aware, it found two new spy programs that I deleted. Went back to the DHMO site again and had the same results so I'm sure that's where the spy programs originated. Normally I wouldn't visit a site twice just to see if it is checking me out, but wanted to follow up on a hunch with the DHMO site. I usually run Ad-aware just once a week, sometimes it doesn't find anything, other times a handful.

 

[Chris N5CWM]

Verrrry Innnnnteresting....

But, how do we know that Ad Aware isn't a keenly

disquised "spy" program itself?



I'm downloading/installing it now to check it out.

 

[WOWZY]

I had 2 also from there also, ILL



I have let it scan once a day for the past 3 months. It usually finds a new one every other day.

 

[Power Wagon]

I did a little research... dhmo.org does not infect your computer with spyware.



Spyware (as lavasoft call it) is generally installed by you, in programs such as gozilla, comet cursor, and others.



The Ad Aware program highlights cookies, such from places like "adclick" to determine where hits to banners come from, and to determine what banners to send you.



For instance, the banner click places can use cookies to track if you've been to OTHER sites that display thier banners. That's it.



They cannot determine your mail address, name, phone number, street address, sex, age, physical location or anything else.



You can, of course, delete their cookies, which simply makes them send a new one, and log you as a "unique visitor".



If you disable cookies, places like TDR will not allow you to "log in", because logins are cookie events. The server uses a cookie to determine who you are at each click. If you delete it, you are an instant unknown. And, you will not be able to use e-commerce sites and/or email sites like yahoo and hotmail.



Of interest to some of you... Is that it tagged one of my kids games as "spyware". We bought it at the store, and it was published by Broderbund, a big name in enter- and edu- tainment software.

 

[Cobra]

POWER WAGON



way to go bro. Geeez things are getting kinda crazy. Glad you researched that for me. I'm a little dense and I was scratching my head about all this.



Thanx.

 

[illflem]

PW, please explain why I can go to DHMO with zero spyware and come away with two. Sounds like Wowzy had the same experence

BTW I downloaded IE 6. 0 this morning, no more need for Ad-aware, new Explorer does it for you. IE also showed dhmo trying to read my cookies. 6. 0 allows you to select which sites can read your cookies and which sites are trying to.

 

[Power Wagon]

"Cookies" are not "spyware". Cookies are a coded string of characters that identify to the server that a browser is one it previously identified. For the most part, they are temporary memory fixtures, which vanish when you close your browser, or move on to other places for a while.



Ad Aware calls the cookies it found "spyware" because they don't come from dhmo.org. Instead, they c ome from a server that supplies banners or ads for dhmo.org. It would be an ad management company. The only thing it can do is tell if you visit another site that carries it's banners. It doesn't know who you are, or anything else about you. By using these procedures, the ad company knows you are not a different person viewing the banner, and so it can tell which banners to send you and / or determine the rate at which the advertiser compensates the place showing the ads.



I did not have any cookies set, myself. Perhaps you visited pages there I did not.



Spyware, on the other hand, is a "trojan horse" program. Something like Comet Cursor, or other active download or "whizbang" type of program that provides you with interactive or changing features. These programs CAN spy on your machine, and tell where you go. Cookies cannot do that, because they are only retrievable by the domain that sent them.



For instance, your TDR cookie cannot be read, written over, accessed, or modified by ANY other site on the internet. It can't even be detected. So, therefore, no other site on the 'net can tell you've been to TDR unless you followed a link from TDR to their site. In which case, the server can detect the "referrer".



Also, IE 4, 5, 6, and various versions of netscape all have the same "ask" feature for cookies. However, on all of them, the default is to accept all cookies without question. You can change it, however.



Because HTTP is a "stateless" protocol, there is NO way for a server to track a browser on a website. A stateless protocol is one where a request is sent, the data that complies with it returned. There is no "interactivity", or maintenance of communication. Thus was born the concept of cookies. It works like a temporary (or not, some places like TDR set them to last long-term, where they reside on your hard drive) "id tag" that is generated by the server side. TDR's cookie contains your ID and if memory serves, some preferences. Others, like the cookies from ad management companies, contain no information at all about YOU, but are generally a randomly generated string of characters that are unique to your browser. Switch from NS to IE and they only know that a new user showed up.



But places like Adclick supply banners to hundreds, if not thousands of sites. They use the returned cookie info to tell if you've been to another advertiser. They use it to see if you clicked on a banner on some site and then followed it and did something on the site it advertises. This is used to distribute revenues and determine ad effectiveness.



You do precisely the same thing, when you use a coupon from your local paper to get something on sale at a chain store.



If you noticed, Ad Aware did not tell you that spyware came from TDR. All it did was search for cookies from well-known ad (web page banner) agency companies and report them to you. They are in a way, spying... not on you, but using them to generate statistical information. Eventually, it should help them to not send ads to sites where the user demography doesn't have an interest in them. But they never know anything about you, nor do they track you. They don't care. It's of no interest to them. Only statistics.

 

[klenger]

Power Wagon



IRV2 reciently signed up Camping World as a sponser for their site. They said that if you use the link on the Camping World banner ad on the IRV2 site, that IRV2 would get some kind of kick back or something for refering someone to the CW site. It this what you are refering to in your above post?



Ken

 

[Power Wagon]

Yup... that's it. Cookies have become a new means of ad tracking. But also and more importantly, credit is still generally given by the referrer log. Of course, to prevent cheating, cookies are used to make sure the owner of the site doesn't just do a million clicks to run up his own numbers. Some advertisers only pay for clicks that result in a sale of some kind. They set a cookie when you view the ad, and if you click on it, it tells the server to log a referral from a specific site and set a cookie as a referral. If you do nothing then, but go back later, your cookie tells the server who you got the referral from in the first place, and so they get credit when you DO buy something. Unless, of course, you delete your cookies. In which case, nobody gets paid.



Referrer logs show the URL your browser was at when it clicked YOUR url or requested data from your server.



What's interesting, is that since my sig picture is hosted at NW Bombers, my logs at nwbombers have a record of every viewer of every post of mine here. Not that I know who any of them are, just the time and date, and the type of browser, and what IP it was at. It makes big logs, but I've never bothered to read it. In fact, when I search the logs for stuff, I try to filter out requests for certain filenames.



Anyway, I hope I've cleared, rather than muddied the waters about what cookies and spyware are, and why they are really separate, even though Ad Aware calls them the same thing.