[plug] unwanted date harvesting by omniture for ebay

[Gavin Chester]

hmm ..., this is Linux-related in the sense that I used linux tools to
check it out. It may be old news to some, but hopefully a 'heads-up' for
many.

SCENARIO:
I'm a frequent ebay user, as I'm sure many pluggers are. I was noticing
a lot of traffic on my modem to and from my machine for extended
periods, which wireshark revealed was from 102.112.2o7.net. 

"hosts" showed this has address 66.235.133.1 (among others), which whois
showed to be "omniture". A googling brought me to a wikipedia page that
said:
"Omniture is a publicly-held online marketing and web analytics company
based in Orem, Utah ... Critics have accused Omniture of attempting to
hide the fact they are collecting data.[7] Critics claim they do this by
sending the information to a domain name that looks and sounds similar
to an IP address used to connect to devices on the local network and not
the Internet. This has led to speculation that the domain name is used
to trick users or firewall rules.[8] Omniture's SiteCatalyst and
SearchCenter products use the 2o7.net domain name.  

Now, the only connection that I've ever had with omniture is when using
ebay I have had requests for cookies from "...esomniture..." when
browsing links within an ebay page. Thinking that it was merely part of
ebay, I've always jsut allowed these cookies. Not anymore! I couldn't
believe the protracted and relentless 'interrogation' that my machine
jsut underwent long after I ended my ebay session! Deleting the cookies
and blocking them in future seems to have stopped it, but I may put an
entry in my hosts file as well. Be warned!

Gavin.