Spyware Warrior

[mikey]

I have no idea what really happened but I still find this interesting; http://www.betabeat.com/2012/02/21/scroogle-privacy-first-search-engine-shuts-down-for-good/ & http://www.betabeat.com/2012/02/15/scroogle-may-have-been-a-victim-of-hackers-not-google/

Seems to be a good alternative; https://www.startpage.com
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[suzi]

Wow very interesting. You have to wonder who was behind the attacks on Scroggle.

When I saw startpage.com it reminded me of something in the past... I think Rob Martin, Spamford Wallace or Walt Picklehead had something called startpage - a homepage hijacker iirc - does that sound familiar mikey?
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[Gary R]

Shame about Scroogle.

I've added StartPage to my Search Box in Firefox, and I'll play with it for a few days and see how it pans out.
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[aBenG]

I was sorry to find Scroogle had finally died, though with the Google throttling it had become increasingly hard to get results from Scroogle over the last year. Strange that after all this time it was finally clobbered by DDoS attacks.

Startpage seems quite decent - I've been using it for a while and the Ixquick proxy is my only way to access one news site. I have to use yet another proxy to access and sign in to another forum. Simply visiting perfectly ordinary safe sites is becoming ridiculous!

http://duckduckgo.com/ also seems very usable - easy to configure and has a variety of search types.
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Inperfect.

[Gary R]

If I need to anonymise myself online, I generally use the TOR browser ... https://www.torproject.org/

It's a little slow because of the mode of operation, but it does make tracing who you are a very difficult proposition.

I normally only use it when visiting sites of a dubious nature.
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[mikey]

"...does that sound familiar mikey?"

I don't think there is a relationship other than a good name.


"http://duckduckgo.com/" Good service but the results are very limited. They simply don't have the massive resources to spider the entire web in a timely manner. Without 'scraping' Google results, there really isn't any way for any search engine to perform as well. Even the other big boys scrape Google too.

Webmasters know this and compound the problem by making their site even more accessible to Google including the use of the SPYWARE known as GoogleAnalytics. BTW This is also the very reason why we see so many bots spoofing the Google user agent now.

aBenG, be carefull with the use of web proxies (http). If you login anywhere or give any other personal info it can be captured. If the admin/webmaster is competent at all, he can even transcode his SSL on the fly too. Personally, I prefer to use random chains of grouped anonymous IP based proxies with one or more of my own in the mix too. I've even been known to use PAC files for even more creative chains. What can I say?...I'm a proxy freak.

Many folks now, including yours truely, sponsor web proxies just to study the bad behavior.
Some here know the guy behind http://xerosurf.com/ He is working on a PHP firewall implementation as well as deving a membership only user base. I'm personally looking fwd to seeing the results of his endeavors....soon I hope.

As for Scroogle; I regret most not downloading all his anti-Google comics!

EDIT: BTW If you are interested in blocking the Google spyware, I described one method here; http://forums.voiceofthepublic.com/smf2/index.php?topic=922.0
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W2K/2K3/XP/2K8/Vista/W7/RHE/DEBIAN/SUSE

Spyware/Adware is NOT freeware, it costs all of us dearly.

Mikey's Stuff

Fiddler and friends...essential web diagnostic, forensic, & development tools.
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[Gary R]

Users of Firefox can block Google Analytics (and a number of other trackers) by using Ghostery .... http://www.ghostery.com/
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[mikey]

Just some Google trivia;

Some here probably remember when the pri-sec community started targeting cross-domain tracking cookies. Some of the ad boys put up more of a fight than others including the propagation of propaganda for misinformation...their machine was big enough to do it too.

Anyway, those of you who remember will also remember the name DoubleClick. With that in mind, I wonder if the following nslookup gives anyone else qualms;

[root@srv01 ~]# host pagead2.googlesyndication.com
pagead2.googlesyndication.com is an alias for pagead.l.doubleclick.net.
pagead.l.doubleclick.net has address 209.85.148.155
pagead.l.doubleclick.net has address 209.85.148.156
pagead.l.doubleclick.net has address 209.85.148.157
pagead.l.doubleclick.net has address 209.85.148.154
_________________
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W2K/2K3/XP/2K8/Vista/W7/RHE/DEBIAN/SUSE

Spyware/Adware is NOT freeware, it costs all of us dearly.

Mikey's Stuff

Fiddler and friends...essential web diagnostic, forensic, & development tools.
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