Web bacon...tsk, tsk, those pigs.

Just when I was getting fed up with "cookies" (nice with a glass of milk, though), there's this? What's a "Web beacon" and, more importantly, WHYYYY?!


Palladium, anyone?

Great news article, thanks a bunch for making that piece of info available here! (It really helps making AW the one-stop place for my daily fix of urgent digital news, not just things directly related to the Amiga community. Two thumbs up!)

So, who else is into bacon? Any other sites we need to be warned about?

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A1G4XE, OS4-pre

I've been using Yahoo's services for over 5 years now..... always been pleased this far, even recommended friends to use Yahoo-mail instead of Hotmail etc. Now this...
my confidence in Yahoo got a real all time low now...

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Site admins are people too..pooff!

According to the few stuff I read it's just a cookie that works on sites that also have "Beacons".
It's a marketing thing, if a site that you visit has that system, it them informs yahoo that you were there and yahoo stores that info. BUT for that to happend the sites MUST have beacons.
Also, from the few info that I read there are already many companies doing a centered marketing publicity like that, only that they're not open about it. At least these ones give you the option to opt out.
Doesn't mean of course that it isn't annoying though....

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José

This just plain sucks. I am really tired of corporations trying to pry into our privacy!! One of these days the "average Joe" is going to get fed up with this type of crap and revolt.

It's even worse that it's not tied to a login but each individual browser. So if you are like me and have IE and Mozilla in Windows and IBrowse in Amiga land, as well as browsers on the work PCs, this becomes a bit of a chore. Plus it doesn't help that my DSL internet as provided by SBC now REQUIRES that I use Yahoo as an email frontend.

I may not have that much of an issue here at home though. I've been running Privoxy and Dansguardian as daisy-chained proxies on my Linux box and it's set to filter out all kinds of things (popup ads, ad banners, etc), simply because of all the stupid "tracking methods" like this that shows up on so many web pages.

Anyway, enough venting on my part.

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This posting, in it's entirety, is the opinion and/or statement of the author and does not reflect the views and/or position of this site.

It seems Yahoo has been extremely busy making us ! Problems with ongoing bandwidth bottlenecks restricting file access, this new Yahoo "spyware" feature, and now, starting Thursday, some emails from Yahoo groups have had their group name substituted with [spam] in the subject header, and the message placed in an attachment! And these messages are regular ones, not spam!

Each time YAM hits one of these emails, it stops cold after downloading it, and refuses to download anything past it! I have to log off in order for it to finally come back to life. It used to be so simple downloading emails before Thursday, when all I had to do was click on "Get" and the emails were all automatically on my hard drive and were deleted off the server . Now, because of this, I have to use "Pre-select" mode for downloading emails so that I can go through the following routine:

1) Click on "Get" to get the listing of all my emails on the POP server.

2) Select "Leave" for each [spam] message so they are ignored at this time and then click on "Start" to download the other emails without the [spam] label.

3) Do another "Get" and "Start". The first [spam] message will download, and then the download will stop as YAM freezes in its tracks.

4) Log off the internet so that YAM reawakens.

5) Log back onto the internet and wait for the POP server I was logged into before to timeout, clicking on "Get" every once in a while to try and get back in, perhaps reading some of the emails I already managed to download earlier while I am currently waiting.

6) When the POP server lets me back in, if all the messages in the list have been downloaded, then go to 8, else select "Leave" for the messages I already downloaded (to ignore them) and click on "Start" to download the next email and YAM freezes again.

7) Go back to 4.

8) Select "Delete only" for all the messages (or "All" and "Delete only") to delete them on the server without downloading (they were already downloaded but not deleted since YAM deletes them after finishing downloading, but now freezes before the downloads complete for [spam] messages).


Email download on 56k dialup line complete! I wonder what else Yahoo has planned up its sleeves?

And what about selecting all the spam emails, click "delete only" then when you click start, it will download only the emails you want...
I think I didn't understand you...

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Philippe 'Elwood' Ferrucci
Sam460 1.10 Ghz
AmigaOS 4 betatester
Amiga Translator Organisation

His lament was that Yahoo is erroneously labeling regular messages as spam, even though they're not, and YAM will hang up trying to download them. The two unrelated problems combine to create one massive headache.

Happily, it hasn't started with my account yet, knock on wood.

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Blocking cookies from yahoo.com should do the trick shouldn't it?

@mikeymike

That is a solution, but it propably creates some new use-related problems instead.

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Site admins are people too..pooff!

Well, today, things seem a little better. Only one email was labelled [spam], but the message wasn't in an attachment like the others were. So, YAM didn't lock up. BTW, this message did appear to be this time. Perhaps there was a glitch yesterday, but then who knows what might happen tomorrow?