A few days ago, I thought that I had posted my last post on this blog.
A bit of a negative post is this. Not intentional, but sometimes we have to be aware of the negatives to be able to focus more on the positives. I always like to feel good, or I always try to make sure that I try to.
I posted the post with the photos of the rain and Spudley the Cat as I had nothing else to write about. As is the case with me, from time to time, I lack inspiration. Sometimes, I have information flowing from places you’d never believe inspiration could flow from, and other times I’m like a dried up old husk.
This week I’m most definitely the latter.
I didn’t want to post about nothing. I didn’t want to write about waffle. I didn’t want to post full stop. So I stopped.
I was intent of slipping away quietly, setting the blog to private in a week or two, and never returning again for, well, for however long.
Time went by. Seasons came and went. OK, maybe not, but four days have passed and still nothing came by me for as much as a sentence to write. And weather-wise I suppose the seasons did come and go!
I’m still receiving the same number of visitors each day that I always did, which is pleasing to say the slightest. I’m receiving hundreds of per cents more spam comments than proper ones, which, is a) not as pleasing, b) actually rather depressing, and c) positively infuriating. I’ve gotten so used to the stupid avatars of the spammers (which are all the same) you’d think there’d be a system in place to bar the accounts in the first place… or at least we could be given a button to bar them permanently. At least! Sigh. Never mind. I suppose I’d have to pay a yearly fee for something like that, and I don’t want to pay for anything that I’m not certain I am going to continue to use. So, I’m stuck with spam.
One thing about the spam commenters that has really grabbed my attention is the fact that the majority of them are for one part of my blog. One page in fact. I rename the page, I give it a completely different web address, yet they continue. It’s as though they are one step ahead of me… but how? How can that be? I wonder…
I’m currently having problems with using Firefox for my browser, as I used to use have problems with Google Chrome (it crashed incessantly). For some reason, any site that has a video in it, Firefox will not show the video, yet Google Chrome will show the video. It (Chrome) crashes everywhere else, but not on videos. So, I’m flipping back and forth between browsers at present. And I’m flipping frustrated as well, but that’s another matter!
Anyway, Firefox has a nifty Add-On that I have been introduced to today. Quite an interesting tool, if I say so myself, which highlights a very frightening phenomenon indeed. And it may go some way to answering why spammers are targeting my Guestbook, of all places!
The Add-On, funnily enough, is called ‘Collusion’. It shows which sites pass details of our visit on, and to what sites. And it works even if the option of ‘Tell Websites I do not want to be tracked’ has been activated. What I mean by this is even though we have requested not to be tracked, our clicks, visits, reads etc. still fire off little ‘branches’ to these other sites anyway. Collusion shows the sites we visit, and the sites our details are passed on to. Advertisers, Facebook, research companies – they are all being sent information about our visit without our knowledge.
The images below show a couple of screenshots from my ten minute web browse earlier this evening:
The first image was generated by Collusion just after I had started browsing, and the second one was refreshed a few minutes later. You can clearly see the sites that I have visited (the ones that glow), and the ones I haven’t (the ones that don’t glow). Each visit to a site generates more of these links.
Even my bank’s website passed details of my visit on to other sites. And some sites pass information on to the same ‘secondary’ site, so eventually the web starts to lock together. The sites are all linked together. And our browsing history is available, well, to everyone on the internet basically. Even though we do not want to be tracked.
I know there’s a big hoo har about cookies at the moment, and although I work in computers I’m not exactly interested in the ins and outs of why we need cookies and, to be honest, I still wouldn’t care if I was told. I’m not entirely bothered about details of my visits to the sites I visit being recorded either, but I’m not entirely keen on other sites being told by the sites that I visit that I visit them (that does make sense, it may need to be read once or twice more!). Oh, they’ll say something like ‘it’s so we can help you to enjoy a more streamlined visiting experience’… but after finding out that my details are being passed on to every Tom, Dick and Harry around the world, while at the same time receiving spam comments from every other Tom, Dick and Harry, my browsing experience is already somewhat diminished in the enjoyment stakes. And breathe.
So… I’m not quitting blogging just yet. I will get around to replying to your comments, for those who have commented recently, but I’ve fallen somewhat very behind once again. I will resume my blog visits as well, in due course.
You may notice that I’m not posting as often as I have done, but I will still continue. There’s a couple more instalments of The Road to Meringue to post, probably next week or so I’d say. I’ve got some updates on my 101 challenge to provide, but the 1001 days may be increased slightly, unless I do more off line.
Which, all things considered, I may be spending more of my time that way anyway.
Not meaning to go all Hammer House of Horror and cause panic in every corner of the world regarding this rather dark area of the web, but sometimes, when you get the feeling that you are being watched you can’t help but look around to see who’s looking. With the internet, we don’t have that luxury… but someone, somewhere has details of where we’ve been browsing. What other information can they gleam from our web visits? And spam could be only the tip of the iceberg.
Download Collusion from Mozilla.org, it’s free, and have a look for yourself. It’s only an experiment at the moment, but a very enlightening one. And I haven’t been paid to write this post.
Fore-warned is fore-armed so they say. At least I know my visits are being passed on by the majority of sites I visit, I can’t do anything about it right now, but hey. One step at a time.
I still feel good, and that, really, is all that matters.
Have a good evening now, and happy browsing!
The Mansionic Perspective 
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