Continuing with Lars question:
>
> When reading Yahoo's privacy policy pages recently, I noticed
> something about "web beacons" being used in addition to cookies.
> This was the first time I encountered the term "web beacons",
> and I must admit that I did not fully understand their page how
> web beacons work. Is anybody familiar with this technique (or
> technology) and willing to shed some light or share a handy URL
> where I could learn more about those strange little beasts?
Because I examine the HTML code in a lot of web pages, for as much curiosity
as anything, I found one of these pages with web beacons in it a few days
ago, but I can't remember where it was to show it to you now. In essence,
what the web beacons are are a few links imbedded in the web page that say
something like this:
[Unable to display image]
I'm only guessing what the numbers really mean, but the first half of the
number, the "pl-234282-a-456", might be an ID number assigned to the
individual user while the second half, the "9928", might be the assigned
customer number (Microsoft, Barnes & Noble, HP, etc.), so that 9928 might
perhaps equal "HP".
When an unsuspecting user's browser comes across the link, it faithfully
tries to pull down the image file, which really isn't there of course. The
browser fails silently in that event, so the browser user never sees
anything. However, what got transmitted to the evil "aics-research.com"
organization's server was an idnumber assigned to the equally unsuspecting
web page owner and the ID number of the organization who's keeping track of
all of this information, which might well be "HP".
To a degree, the explanation above is supposition on my part, but given a
general description of what web beacons are, and the form of the unusual link
that I found the other day, I would suspect that this general explanation is
likely to be close to the truth.
Wirt Atmar
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