setuid Gnome Applet (Link-Monitor-Applet)

[Aaron Lake]

Firstly hello all I'm striving to become a future MOTU, and of all goes
well you'll be hearing more from me in the near future.

On to the question:

For my first contribution to Universe I propose
Link Monitor Applet - A nifty application that monitors sites via a
gnome-panel applet.
URL: http://www.nongnu.org/link-monitor/

Now really on the the question:
Per the authors notation in the INSTALL file
=================================
The install phase will enable the setuid bit on the link-monitor-applet
binary (root privileges are needed to create the ICMP and ICMPv6 sockets
upon applet startup; they will be dropped after that step), therefore
you need to run the install phase as root.
=================================

Post install (postinst) I've set `chmod u
+s /usr/bin/link-monitor-applet` which is generally not good practice,
nor is having many setuid binaries.  Would anyone know of a usable
workaround that could alleviate this problem?  Would this be a candidate
for an aproved package with setting uid on the binary?

I'm open to suggestions, thanks in advance.

Regards,
Aaron M. Lake