![]() ![]() (I guess he must have read Robert Kimball's letter too.) of Government Affairs and Privacy informs me that I am absolutely, totally, and completely mistaken and insists that I immediately take this page down and retract all of my public statements to everyone who has received them. In the case of Netscape's Smart Download, the computer's individual Internet IP address is also sent as a "cookie header" which would tend to defeat IP-masking proxies and anonymizers.īy Certified Mail I receive RealNetworks' threat letter which I ignore because it's just so much nonsense and proceed to initiate a very constructive dialog with two representatives of RealNetworks. Multiloader v5 33 exe full#This report includes the full URL of the file being downloaded and an "ID Tag" which could be used to uniquely identify the downloading computer. I confirmed that all three programs send a report back to their publishers whenever the program is used to download any file through the Internet. In each case, the behavior I examined resulted from each program's "default configuration" which is enabled unless deliberately disabled by the user. Multiloader v5 33 exe series#I download fresh copies of all three Download Demon-descended file downloading utilities and conduct a series of tests to verify the rumors I've heard about their "phoning home" behavior. That certainly makes file downloads seem far less "anonymous" than RealNetworks continues to allege. When I confronted RealNetworks with this, they explained that it was due to the fact that I had purchased a product from them in the past, and the "cookie" my system had received during the purchase was being returned to them. VERY IMPORTANT: When I re-examined my findings in the face of RealNetworks' insistence that I was absolutely wrong about my conclusions, I caught something that I had missed before: My exact personal name and private eMail address was being sent back to RealNetworks whenever I downloaded a file. ![]() for whatever purpose the program's publishers may have today, or tomorrow. This allows a database of your entire, personal, file download history to be assembled and uniquely associated with your individual computer. ĮVERY TIME you use one of these utilities to download ANY FILE from ANYWHERE on the Internet, the complete "URL address" of the file, along with a UNIQUE ID TAG that has been assigned to YOUR machine, and in the case of Netscape's SmartDownload only YOUR computer's individual Internet IP address, is immediately transmitted to the program's publisher. Page Updated: Tuesday, October 10th, 2000Īs you will see on the page below, if you use the RealNetworks RealDownload, Netscape/AOL Smart Download, or NetZip Download Demon utilities in their default configuration. By Steve Gibson, Gibson Research Corporation - 4 ![]()
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