On Tue, 15 Dec 2009, Edward Ned Harvey wrote: >> What makes you the most upset: that you've just learned that all >> browsers have this function or that Google is using this function? > > What do you mean "all browsers have this function?" > > The browser, as I understand it, can only detect things which have been > enabled by you installing something previously. The part that surprised me > was that some previous (presumably google) app that I installed, enabled > google's webpage to determine various apps installed on my computer, even > non-google, non-plugin apps, such as Adobe. > > I don't know how much power was granted to that application, I don't know > what application it is (or are), and I don't know how they will use it. > > It means that during some previous app installation, I must have casually > accepted a EULA (presumably from google) that granted more rights on my > system than I expected. > > When you install Picasa, or Chrome, or Google Earth, generally speaking, you > don't expect that you might be weakening the security of Firefox. > > Incidentally, the same is not true on the mac. When I browse > http://pack.google.com in the Mac, the webpage knows nothing. Why? Maybe > because picasa isn't installed, or some other app... Or maybe google > doesn't care about spying into the macs because they're just not popular > enough. Or maybe there's a fundamental difference somewhere that doesn't > enable it. I don't know why.
one fundamental difference is that on Windows every application puts itself in the registry in a known location. As such it's easy for browsers to see if an app is installed. On *nix systems (including Macs) it's not as trivial to see this. I think that the closest that you have on *nix is the mime.types file. and it's not just that it's easier to do, I believe that on Windows systems looking in the registry for this sort of thing is how applications like browsers are supposed to find out if such things are installed. I expect that if you went to the same site on firefox or IE you would get very similar results. David Lang _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lopsa.org http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
