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[nycphp-talk] Hmm, how to count 'online' users?

Ajai Khattri ajai at bitblit.net
Thu Aug 12 15:04:15 EDT 2004


Eddie Haber wrote:

>You can always attach a unique id to avoid caching:
>
>'"<img 
>src="http://www.spyware.com/trojan_images/listener.php?login=poor_sap@bigbro
>ther.com&uniqueid='.md5(uniqid()).'" height="1" width="1">"'
>
>Even better, You can email these gifs to people and track when they read
>your emails. 
>

Yep - this why Im loathe to open spam messages since spammers could 
track images in HTML-formatted email and see if you read their email.

Luckily, with the preferences setup the right way in Mozilla you can 
mark a message as spam without ever opening it - this has helped train 
my Bayesian filter pretty well now. I also note, in 1.7 (maybe it was in 
1.6 too) a new preference under Privacy: "Do not load images in mail and 
newsgroup messages" which can also guard against this kind of thing...

-- 
Aj.
Systems Administrator / Developer




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