On Wed, 09 Jul 2003 13:54:17 GMT, "Richard Steinfeld"
<rgsteinBUTREMOVETHIS@sonic.net> wrote:

>KQED is the largest public broadcaster in northern
>California. It operates TV Channel 9, an FM station, various
>repeaters for both in different areas, and now, having
>purchased one of those ubiquitous Christian FM stations,
>radio to Sacramento despite the fact that there was already
>a public station there.
>
>I discovered degraded system performance when I was on their
>web site, and with effort, traced the problem to
>transmissions from my machine to imrworldwide.

If you view the web page source you'll see why.

>When i
>emailed them, KQED acknowledged their use of this tool. They
>said that they had selected RedSheriff because it was the
>least likely to cause consternation among their site users.
>I logged a separate transmission to imrworldwide with every
>mouse click while I was on the KQED web site.

IE with scripting enabled?

>I noticed that on their site, imrworldwide proclaims the
>superiority of their product at evading firewalls; sure
>enough, that's where I found it logged as it merrily
>subverted my protection.

If you use IE with active content enabled you have no protection

>I believe that the way that this
>operation works is to comandeer some of our computer memory
>to efferctively establish a server in our machines:
>effectively creating a "computer within the computer." Quite
>a theft of processing power.

Nah. Looks to me like you were simply being referred to a imrworldwide
server which tried to obtain what info it could on you.

>Our 900-pound Public Broadcaster is blindly devoted to
>obtaining stats regardless of how odious the practice or
>method is (and how questionable it is to devote scarce
>resources to this techno-fluff). I registered an objection.
>Instead of stopping this odious (and costly!) practice,
>KQED's response to my objection was to post a statement
>about their use of RedSheriff on their policy page.
>
>Perhaps if we all refuse to contribute to any public
>broadcaster invading our systems and privacy this way, and
>let them know how we feel and the impact on their bottom
>lines, they'll get the message loud and clear.

I think it's far better to simply use the latest Moz based browser
with Proxomitron and not be concerned about what web sites try to do.

I had no problems whatseover at the site.

Art
http://www.epix.net/~artnpeg