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