Firefox 's Ping Attribute: Useful or Spyware?

An anonymous reader writes "The Mozilla Team has quietly enabled a new feature in Firefox that parses 'ping' attributes to anchor tags in HTML. Now links can have a 'ping' attribute that contains a list of servers to notify when you click on a link. Although link tracking has been done using redirects and Javascript, this new "feature" allows notification of an unlimited and uncontrollable number of servers for every click, and it is not noticeable without examining the source code for a link before clicking it."

Required!

[Shadow Wrought]

At least for childbirth. Bring in the machine that goes, PING!

Re:Firefox's Ping Attribute: Useful AND Spyware

[Stevyn]

Nooo! Here in the US, the media polarizes two options and have people in bow ties argue it. You're either in agreement with this idea or totally against it.

they're watching....

[to_kallon]

as i read the summary i became overcome with fear when the updates are available dialogue popped up at the bottom of my screen. coincidence....?

Give me aping. One ping only, please

[hkgroove]

This will make it easier for Ramius to declare his intention is to defect.

As I understand it...

[Oy Vey]

This single attribute will notify "a list of servers to notify when you click on a link".

Is this the one rule to ping them all?

Re:Firefox's Ping Attribute: Useful AND Spyware

[dubl-u]

Once users start blocking ping URLs, as they inevitably will, this transparency means that click stats will be very unreliable.

A very small portion of people (including apparently a number of needlessly alarmed people on Slashdot) will bother to turn this off. The vast majority of humanity will continue not to care. This will add a small amount of unreliability to click stats, but that unreliability will be swamped by the normal apparent unreliability of the web caused by different configurations, different browsers, different OSes, different platforms, a wide variety of proxies, and cats chewing on ethernet cables.

The kinds of people who use these stats seriously already know that they are statistics, not crime scene records.

Re:Firefox's Ping Attribute: Useful AND Spyware

[aled]

I don't agree, prepare to die!