On Sat, 1 Jun 2002, Glen Ditchfield wrote:
On June 1, 2002 11:00 am, ed orphan wrote:
I've been reading an alarming article in 2600 "How to Regain Privacy on the Net" which mentions web bugs... Is there any software I can use in Linux to keep these web bugs off my computer
KMail from KDE 3.0 (and possibly earlier versions) has a web bug blocker. See Settings > Configure KMail..., Security settings, General tab. "Allow mails to load external references from the net" is disabled by default. The pop-up help for that control gives a little information about web bugs.
Essentially, for those who don't have kmail loaded, it's reading an HTML formatted mail (always a bad idea :-) ) and the HTML e-mail loads external images not attached to the e-mail. Obviously, by tracking access to that image, they can tell who's read the e-mail and from where. KMail can handle it, and oddly, so can my mail reader of choice, Pine :-) Scott -- Scott L. Balneaves | "If people are good only because they Unix Administrator | fear punishment, and hope for reward, Legal Aid Manitoba | then we are a sorry lot indeed." sbalneav@legalaid.mb.ca | -- Albert Einstein