8.04?

[Bob McConnell]

Nils Kassube wrote:
> Dotan Cohen wrote:
>> True, but in a general sense, I understand the concerns of many that
>> all traffic to XYZ URL is passing through a third party, including the
>> ability of that party to track them.
> 
> With tinyurl you just get a redirection to the actual URL. While they can 
> find out from which site you are coming they can't really track you 
> unless you only go to URLs via tinyurl. And because you seem to be very 
> paranoid, let me ask you what do you do against beeing tracked by Google 
> and Doubleclick? You can't be seriously concerned about possibly being 
> tracked by tinyurl if you use a Gmail address.
> 
> 
> Nils
> 

Both tinyurl and the destination site will have a log of your IP 
address. The only way to prevent that is to use a blind proxy, like TOR. 
They may also record the referrer url, but that is not as likely any 
more since it is too easy to fake. Plus, in Firefox and other browsers 
you can block the referrer link from being sent to the new server.

My question with tinyurl is this. I have dnsmasq running on one of my 
servers as an internal nameserver. It only passes requests for FQDN out 
to my ISP's DNS. I can blackhole known malicious sites by adding them to 
the hosts file on my server with a destination address of 127.0.0.1 or 
just point them at one of my local Apache servers to get a quick 404 
(Page not found) error. I haven't taken a close look at what tinyurl 
returns, but can it bypass my blackhole list and send me to a site I 
already know I don't want?

Bob McConnell
N2SPP