Internet Explorer - Smart Tags

It appears that Microsoft has developed a new way to make your system more user hostile - Smart Tags. Starting with IE 6 and Office XP, the browser searches ANY displayed page and inserts its own hyperlinks to additional sites. That's right, Microsoft is modifying your creative work, and probably making money off any click throughs. This sounds like a basic copyright violation - creating a derivative work without written permission.

You can add a metatag to each of your pages to disable some of this crap. (Yeh, some but not all.)

This zdnet article demonstrates how dangerous and illegal this new technology is.

On 6-27-01, Microsoft announced that Smart Tags will not be a part of IE 6, in part, because of "external feedback".

I have no problem with requiring a meta tag to enable smart tags on specific pages. It's requiring meta tags to disable the feature that I object to.


Copy Cats

This problem refuses to go away. According to Forget Smart Tags; TopText Is Doing What You Feared (Sept 2001), there have been several programs that modify other peoples web pages for profit. However, they have all failed until eZula came out with TopText which adds yellow hyperlinks to all visited pages. This advertising parasite is downloaded with KaZaA, a popular file sharing program. Of course, they make a profit on each click through.


Author: Robert Clemenzi - clemenzi@cpcug.org
URL: http:// cpcug.org / user / clemenzi / technical / ie / IE_SmartTags.htm