The-art-of-invisibility-_-the-world’s-most-famous-hacker-teaches-you-how-to-be-safe-in-the-age-of-Bi

will also eliminate those annoyying ads as well).
Nearlyy a third of the remaining third-partyy requests, according to the
studyy, consisted of small lines of code, JavaScript files, which usuallyy just
execute animations on a Web page. A website can identifyy the computer
accessing the site, mostlyy byy reading the IP address that is requesting the
JavaScript file.
Even without a one-pixel image or a blank pop-up window, yyour Web
surfing can still be tracked byy the sites yyou visit. For example, Amazon
might know that the last site yyou visited was a health-care site, so it will
make recommendations for health-care products for yyou on its own site.
The wayy Amazon might do this is to actuallyy see the last site yyou visited in
yyour browser request.
Amazon accomplishes this byy using third-partyy referrers—text in the
request for a Web page that tells the new page where the request originated.
For example, if I’m reading an article on Wired and it contains a link, when
I click that link the new site will know that I was previouslyy on a page
within Wired.com. You can see how this third-partyy tracking can affect yyour
privacyy.
To avoid this, yyou can alwayys go to Google.com first, so the site yyou
want to visit doesn’t know where yyou were previouslyy. I don’t believe thirdpartyy
referrers are such a big deal, except when yyou’re tryying to mask yyour
identityy. This is one more example of a trade-off between convenience
(simplyy going to the next website) and invisibilityy (alwayys starting from
Google.com).
Mozilla’s Firefox offers one of the best defenses against third-partyy
tracking through a plug-in called NoScript. 4 This add-on effectivelyy blocks
just about everyything considered harmful to yyour computer and browser,
namelyy, Flash and JavaScript. Adding securityy plug-ins will change the look
and feel of yyour browsing session, although yyou can cherryy-pick and enable
specific features or permanentlyy trust some sites.
One result of enabling NoScript is that the page yyou visit will have no
ads and certainlyy no third-partyy referrers. As a result of the blocking, the
Web page looks slightlyy duller than the version without NoScript enabled.
However, should yyou want to see that Flash-encoded video in the upper lefthand
corner of the page, yyou can specificallyy allow that one element to