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Archive for the ‘Firefox’ Category

I recently learned of the company Phorm (aka webwise.net).  I won’t waste time here explaining why this company is so bad.  Instead, do a google search for them or, better yet, check out the Leo Laporte-Steve Gibson podcast, “Security Now”, episode #151 for the lowdown.

For this space, I just want to give a quick tip on stopping this horrible spyware in your Firefox browser.  So, here we go:

• Open Firefox and click the “Tools” menu.
• Choose “Options”.
• Click the “Privacy Tab”.
• First, and this has nothing to do with Phorms, make sure you have unchecked the “Accept third party cookes” radio button.  Then, click the “Exceptions” button next to “Accept cookies from sites”.
• Now enter in webwise.net and, for safety’s sake, www.webwise.net and click the “Block” button after entering each of these items.
• Click “OK” and you’re done.

We get a lot of questions about questionable tracking of web surfing by third parties such as DoubleClick and how to deal with this issue.

The main issue with such practices is that a cookie is loaded, without your knowledge, into your web browser and then it “phones home” to the originating site to report all of your online habits - sites visited, etc. This info is then used by the originator to serve up ads to you.

For the most this is fairly benign, but there are exceptions. An example of benign would be this: you visit a site which has partnered with with DoubleClick to host their ads. DoubleClick then loads a cookie into your browser which reports back to them a list of all of the web sites you visit. Slowly they build a profile of you. Lets say you visit several sites about bicycling. Then the next time you visit a site which has partnered with DoubleClick (and there are many) you may see ads for things such as Trek Bicycles (I don’t know if Trek is a partner - it’s only an example). I call this benign because, really, most of us would rather see ads for things we are interested in as opposed to things we have no interest in.

But, there is the whole privacy issue - most of us do not want to be tracked like it’s 1984!

So, here is a quick tutorial on how to stop this starting with Internet Explorer.

Open IE (this example uses IE 7, but you can do the same in IE 6) and choose the Tools menu and then Internet Options.

Now click on the Privacy Tab and then choose Advanced.

Now click the “Override automatic cookie handling” radio button and then, under Third-party Cookies choose Block then OK it and you are all done.

For Firefox, unfortunately, it’s not quite so easy. Here we go.

Open Firefox and choose Tools and then Options.

Then click on the Privact Tab and choose Exceptions.

Now comes the hard part. You will need to manually enter the addresses of the sites you want to block from loading third-party cookies. Firefox, unlike IE, has no blanket cover for this. We recommend starting with sites in the following screen shot, but there are many others you can safely block as well. Just enter the address as it appears below and then click Block. Good luck!

Netflix is a wonderful service, but they have the annoying problem of being tied to Internet Explorer for their online viewing system. So for all of us Firefox users I sat down and took a look at this problem and found a simple solution.

First, open Firefox, click the “Tools” menu and choose “Add-Ons”.

Next choose “Get Extensions” a the bottom right of the box.

In the search box type “IE Tab” and hit “Search” and you should find the extension called “IE Tab”.

Click the extension and choose to “Install Now”.

Next go to the Netflix website and then click the “Tools” menu and choose “IE Tab Options”.

Now add netflix.

That’s all it takes. Now whenever you go to Netflix it will be fooled into thinking you are running IE and you can view movies online.