Hi,

John Gordon Ollason wrote:
I participate in a discussion board hosted in America. Yesterday, the sig line of one of the other participants fed me back my Internet address, the operating system, linux, the browser, Opera, I was using, and the company name of my ISP.

All that is happening there is that they are including a <img> link to an image generator script on the danasoft.com server, which causes your browser to make an HTTP request to that machine, which then finds out all that information from the TCP connection and the headers your browser sends. Every website you go to will get this information, often several times (once per page, stylesheet, and image etc you download).

Am I making a fuss about nothing? Is there any linux software that I can install that will prevent this behaviour?

One course of action would be to use an adblock-style extension, if there is one for Opera, to deny requests to that domain. Alternatively you could put something like:

127.0.0.1       www.danasoft.com

into your /etc/hosts file, which will redirect any request for that domain to your own machine, which will likely fail and you won't get the image. You might need to change the name of the server. It's actually nothing to worry about, in my view. It is rather obnoxious though.

Michael

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