SillyDog701

by **Mandrake** » Sun 21 Sep, 2003 3:55 am

I was looking around on the Internet today, regarding the ad technology used in Opera, and I found a rather unsettling article on the Internet. Bascially suggesting that Opera could indeed be spyware, the result of reading the article was that I have removed Opera from my machine (XP Pro and Redhat 9). If anyone else is interested in the article, it can be read here.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.5b) Gecko/20030917 Firebird/0.6.1+ (chocoba65 DOMi/Venkman/AthlonXP SSE)

by **Edward** » Sun 21 Sep, 2003 7:34 am

I do not believe Opera is spyware.

I recommend you read this, specifically the paragraph titled "What Opera does not do".

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624

by **profman** » Sun 21 Sep, 2003 3:35 pm

The original article now links to what is essentially a retraction. See The INQUIRER, Andrew Busigin and Opera.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20030916

by **DJGM** » Tue 23 Sep, 2003 1:51 pm

I used to think Opera's adware was using some sort of spyware mechanism, until I ran Ad-Aware.
Any spyware found after the scan completed, was not connected to Opera, but mostly through
the ad-banners displayed on the copy of KaZaa that I was using at the time. This was back
when Netscape 6.2 was my default browser, and Opera was used as a backup browser.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 Netscape/7.1 (DJGM-i.net)

by **Fulvio** » Tue 23 Sep, 2003 3:27 pm

One of the most pompous articles, I have ever seen. The guy must like to listen to himself.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 Netscape/7.1 (ax) (CK-SillyDog)

by **Wellander** » Tue 14 Oct, 2003 10:29 pm

Mandrake wrote:I was looking around on the Internet today, regarding the ad technology used in Opera, and I found a rather unsettling article on the Internet. Bascially suggesting that Opera could indeed be spyware, the result of reading the article was that I have removed Opera from my machine (XP Pro and Redhat 9). If anyone else is interested in the article, it can be read here.

Hi,
Are you trying to sabotage the browser that is gaining users?
If so it is not good.
I do not use it but I want to see it gain users.
Please do not do this.

Spelling corrected by Admin

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007

by **Gregor** » Wed 15 Oct, 2003 12:55 am

Doing what actually, Wellander ?

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 Netscape/7.1 (ax) (CK-SillyDog)

by **Wellander** » Wed 15 Oct, 2003 1:25 am

Gregor wrote:Doing what actually, Wellander ?

Hi,
Trying to make people stop using opera.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007

by **Mandrake** » Wed 15 Oct, 2003 2:34 am

I'm not trying to stop people at all from using Opera, but I am VERY careful about using programs that contain advertising, I installed it on my other PC - ran Ad-aware and everything else, used it for a few days (Noting the types of ads that came in etc) - it just displays random ad banners and doesn't seem to be spyware at all, it's fine with me.

I wasn't reccommending people use Opera, nor was I suggesting that they shouldn't use Opera - I was just interested to see what everyone else thinks about the ad technology used in Opera. It's clearly not intrusive or spyware - unlike programs like KaZaA that includes Cydoor advertising.

I even installed the 7.1.1 on my main machine now :-)

This 7.2.1, is there any good features that make it worth while upgrading?

UserAgent: Opera/7.11 (Windows NT 5.1; U) [en]

by **Gregor** » Tue 21 Oct, 2003 12:23 am

Yes they are. From 7.11 to 7.20 they were 13 beta releases and almost 100 bugfixes. It is worth to upgrade.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 Netscape/7.1 (ax) (CK-SillyDog)

by **James** » Wed 22 Oct, 2003 9:04 am

Hi Guys (and Gals)

I've been using Opera for a little over a month now (even purchased it) and my wife is now using it as well on her computer. We both love the way in which Opera can be customized to suit the individual and we are very pleased with the security it provides. Their forum is awesome. Any problem I've encountered has been dealt with in a very courteous and timely manner.

Right now Opera is my default browser and Firebird/Thunderbird a close second. I must admit to preferring Opera's method of tabbed browsing over FB's but that is more a matter of taste than functionality.

UserAgent: Opera/7.21 (Windows NT 5.1; U) [en]

by **Edward** » Wed 22 Oct, 2003 5:34 pm

One 7.2x bug not fixed, that found its way into the Linux version of 7.2x, was header/footer printing. Specifically, they would print on page 1, but if a page had multiple pages, they would not print on page 2 and subsequent.

Reported? Yes.

Fixed? No.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i586; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 Netscape/7.1

by **Gregor** » Wed 22 Oct, 2003 11:56 pm

Jarrad :
I forgot to mention one very important thing:
There is a serious security hole in Opera 7.20, that`s why so fast 7.21 was releised.
Quote from Panda Oxygen report:

This security problem stems from the fact that certain HREFs cause a buffer
overflow. Sometimes the crash will be immediate, and on other occasions when
the browser is closed, presumably as the resources are freed up. This
vulnerability could allow the execution of arbitrary code.

The Opera mail system is also affected by this problem, as an attacker can
send an email containing HTML to a user running the Opera mail client and
cause this overflow to occur when the HTML is rendered.

Opera has released version 7.21 of the browser to resolve this problem, and
which can be downloaded from: http://www.opera.com/download/

Gregor

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 Netscape/7.1 (ax) (CK-SillyDog)

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