[plug] unwanted date harvesting by omniture for ebay

[Bernd Felsche]

Gavin Chester <gavin.chester at gmail.com> wrote:

>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!

I'm running behind a proxy firewall and let the proxy server filter
nasty and undesirable stuff. It's done using squidGuard from squid.

One can define the 2o7.net domain (and others) in one of several
configurable blacklists.

I've customised blacklists for banner ads (URLs can be pattern
matched) and other annoying web junk. Unfortunately I can no longer
read online definitions of "naked DSL", but that's a small price to
pay.
-- 
/"\ Bernd Felsche - Innovative Reckoning, Perth, Western Australia
\ /  ASCII ribbon campaign | The growth of knowledge depends
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