Invasions of Privacy

[azekeil]

Ah yes, something that's been bugging me for a while. Mocko's LJToys. Just for those of you who don't know, taken from the site:

LJToys is a system for tracking hits to your livejournal. Its fairly clever, some might even say sneaky, but all good dirty fun. It attempts to tell you the following things:

• Who's read your posts
• Where from (ip address, can be mapped to a particular location / person)
• Changes to people's friend lists - mailed to you every night
• Who on your friends list really reads your journal. And who doesn't. [Paid accounts]
• Cute li'l charts of who's been reading your journal the most
• Info on individual LJ users - how often we've seen them & where from (that last bit can be pretty interesting...

Also there's a bunch of extra-cool new stuff:

• Custom web bugs - drop these into a web page and hits to it will magically appear in your readers list [paid accounts]
• Graphs! Beautiful graphs of how many hits your journal has had each day.
• Anonymous comment identification - LJToys tries to guess who made an anon. comment based on which of your friends were using LiveJournal at the time. An inexact science but hey, it kinda works. [Paid accounts]

I remember the furor that surrounded the invasion of privacy of embedded transparent gifs in posts to log such details. Well I for one dislike having information collected on my browsing habits without my knowledge or consent. There is an easy solution to this: block image loading from "lj.mocko.org.uk". In FireFox, you can do this by going to Tools(menu)->Options->Content(tab). Click on the "Exceptions..." button for "Load Images" and enter "lj.mocko.org.uk" (without quotes) and click "Block". Click "Close" and "OK" and enjoy browsing LJ without having your privacy breached. The images are used in mood icon sets, so you will no longer see those people's mood icons after the change.

While we're on about geeky things, if you have FireFox (don't forget 1.5 is out!), go and get FasterFox. Speed up your browser by tweaking things. I wouldn't recommend you use the link prefetch (see advanced settings to be sure you've turned it off) unless you are the only person using your connection, however, as it's likely to upset your work / flatmates etc.

Comments

[meltie.livejournal.com]

I've known this is easily doable for years, I should've actually done it instead of thinking about it in the bath, and charged $5 per month for access to your own data.

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

Yep. They do.

[wintrmute.livejournal.com]

Exactly.. Anyone could do it if they tried.. this is just opening it up to the masses.

I've been blocking the webbugs for a while myself, I know various others do too.

But as easily as the system works, it's easy to subvert, too.
If everyone who was using it gets ludicrous results, they're unlikely to continue paying.

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

You're one of the perps!

Although it would be interesting to see what people were doing on your access point. If I ever chose to run an open access point, I'd have it going through my linux box and log the packet dump of people whose mac addresses I don't know. I might even do a SSL Man In The Middle attack on them.. serves them right for being stupid and trying to take advantage of my connection :)

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

Good point. Very useful.

I think people have already attacked the IP == person argument already, but that is a great idea.

Might do that and restrict it to 1k/s either way to the internet only for unknown MACs :)

[zeke-hubris.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the helpful, non-geek friendly advice :-)

FasterFox really does seem to have made a noticeable difference to my machines speed.

[scottscidmore.livejournal.com]

A note on FasterFox. It tends to be overly enthusiastic about its preloading, which is starting to tick off site operators. They're doing things to detect the preloading, which in FireFox isn't following some of the polite behavior rules, and sending such users to 'scold' pages; effectively blocking the site from those users.

One of the free WiFi spots I use seems to do a similar preload if it's lightly loaded; as a result I've run into a number of sites that dumped me off into a scold page.

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

Interesting! I have to say I turn off the pre-loading as I share my connection with others and it's not very friendly to them.

[bex-sgs.livejournal.com]

I don't have a "content" tab :(

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

Are you using Firefox? A recent version (1.5 is the latest)?

If not, you can achieve the same result, yet cruder, by clicking Start->Run. Type in "notepad %systemroot%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts" (no quotes) and press enter. Add a line at the end that looks like this:

127.0.0.1        lj.mocko.org.uk

Save the file and automagically the same thing will happen. This will also stop you from browsing that site, but there you go.

[sepheri.livejournal.com]

Being a paranoid person I had a feeling my ex's who are much more computer savvy than me would have a way to find out if I was readint thier ljs or not.

I'm using Firefox but I don't have an 'Options' option in the 'Tools' menu.
I'm not downloading 1.5 yet cos it doesn't work wirh Deepest Sender yet.

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

See my answer to bex_sgs above.

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

If you're not using windows but linux, the same result can be achieved by entering the same information into /etc/hosts. :)

[sepheri.livejournal.com]

Hmm...you're not making any sense to me now. Maybe I will just show this post to a man who might.

[daemons-goddess.livejournal.com]

thanks for that hun that was interesting to know ive now done it on mine dont want sneaky people looking at what i am lol

[teadaemon.livejournal.com]

Not sure if it makes any difference, but since you posted this, the individual responsible has moved the ljtoys website to ljtoys.org.uk. I've no idea if they've altered the actual code as well, but I think I'm going to block the new domain as well.

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

Ah, interesting, thank you. I will update my list accordingly.

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