Trying to get completely rid of the *.1e100.net and *.1e100.com URLs has proven to be a PITA. Disabling everything in FF DOESN’T prevent the connections. So I started chopping them off at the firewall (again another PITA). If you can add more to the story please leave a note below. Bob
After doing a lot of searching I found the piece below, have a read it’s pretty interesting:
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Why The Fool blocks Google Safe-Browsing
August 29, 2009 · Filed Under Networking, News
The Fool is an Italian start-up founded by Matteo Flora, a security consultant known for having helped Silvio Berlusconi’s Mediaset to put together the data required to bring a 500 million euros lawsuit against Google and YouTube in July 2008. On the blog of FoolDNS, the main product offered by The Fool, the company has recently explained the reasons why Google Safe-Browsing is part of the service blacklist hence it is blocked for users and companies which use it.
FoolDNS is a website filtering and Internet usage monitoring system working at the DNS level, likewise to other services as the well known OpenDNS. Google Safe-Browsing, on the other hand, started as an optional add-on for Mozilla Firefox and eventually turned into an anti-phishing and anti-malware API-based service, currently implemented on Firefox, Safari and obviously the Google-browser Chrome.
“For years we said that SafeBrowsing is the main reason for the millionaire agreement between Mozilla Foundation and Google - the FoolDNS blog states - because the system allows to trace the behaviours of single users behind any IP effectively allowing the user identification by his browser’s UniqueID even after Cookies deletion and roaming between home and office“.
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The Italian company says that, essentially, Google uses and abuses the (real) protection offered by Safe-Browsing to have the chance to (presumably) track users in a univocal way, without depending on cookies or other temporary identification systems that are easy to bypass. To corroborate its theory, FoolDNS quotes “the very highly esteemed” site Ha.ckers.org in a post that highlights the oddities of Safe-Browsing’s home-phoning system.
“When I started looking at Chrome I noticed two additional pieces of information that were being phoned home outside of Safe Browsing” the Ha.ckers.org post says. This two extra data pieces, tagged machineid and userid, “both computed information based on machine/user information“, and were sent together with other data useful to Google to decide if there was the need of a protection update.
“The real question“, the post continues, is “why would Google need to know my machineid and userid to give me an update - wouldn’t the version number of my browser be enough to make that decision? I just can’t believe this isn’t used for tracking“. “There’s no more plausible deniability“, Ha.ckers.org and FoolDNS say together, Google Safe-Browsing is “a perfect way to spy on people” by exploiting the browser against users in the name of security.
The conclusion of the post is that “Safe Browsing is a great feature since it protects you from phishing and malware sites“, but despite of what stated in the Google privacy policy, facing a law court order Mountain View would be obliged to blurt out everything the company knows about a particular user, including the eventual tracking data gathered up to that time. On Firefox it is possible to disable the service to protect one’s own privacy, but as of Chrome the only useful advice is “don’t use it“.
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