favicon.ico

[James Love <love@cptech.org>]

More on the favicon.ico
jamie

---------------
Subject: favicon.ico (was: Robert David Graham on IE5 security problems)
      Date: Mon, 19 Apr 1999 17:20:09 -0700
     From: terry jones <terry@cliffs.ucsd.edu>
       To: love@cptech.org
       CC: Multiple recipients of list RANDOM-BITS
<random-bits@essential.org>
            farber@cis.upenn.edu, rob@netice.com
 References: 
          1

I'd noticed the favicon requests to my server and guessed IE5 was
doing something like this. I figured it would be a short-lived IE5
feature once someone made a small Netscape (for example) icon and put
it on the server. I think such an icon would get spread around the net
rather quickly :-)

As far as putting log files on the web goes, it's amazing that it
still goes on. Four or five years ago it was almost something that was
done as a matter of course. These days commercial sites that leave
their web logs exposed are giving away money. Understanding where
one's competition gets their hits from is worth lots of money. I've
been paid to do this kind of research from time to time. You can
already do a lot with Alta Vista (e.g., what sites link to my
competition's site(s) that do not link to me?). For about two years
I've been expecting to hear that a company has been broken into
electronically and had just their web logs stolen. It will happen.
There's a huge amount of valuable information in them (what keywords
are working for the competiton? how successful is the competition's
spending on web advertising? which sites seem to work well for
advertising?). But if sites just leave their web logs open for casual
browsing, there's no need to break in...


Regards,
Terry.


-- 
James Love, Director, Consumer Project on Technology
P.O. Box 19367, Washington, DC 20036
http://www.cptech.org    love@cptech.org
Voice 202.387.8030, Fax 202.234.5176