Re: [Gnash] spyware buried in Flash movies

[Nicolas Cannasse]

Rob Savoye wrote:
> While watching some debug messages fly by, I noticed this link that 
> luckily was failing: http://mochibot.com. It turns out Mochibot is 
> spyware for Flash movies. When a movie is played, their server is 
> contacted, and they track who and where the movie is being played.
>
> Anyway, "elvis" is now clean. Sorry for not noticing earlier. I'll be 
> careful when collecting test cases off the net... I imagine there are 
> other companies embedding this sort of thing into Flash movies, but at 
> least now I know to look for it.
>
>     - rob -

It's one of the possibilities of Flash of being able to connect to a 
server and exchange data. You can't really do any serious application 
without that. The difference between Spyware and this website is that 
Spyware works for *everything* you're doing while this website can only 
report you're visiting it (just like any hit counter BTW, or Apache logs 
as well). But it can't know what you're visiting else.

Nicolas