IN THIS CHAPTER
Many tools are available to you if you are looking to protect your data. The list is almost endless: digital certificates, packet filters, strong encryption, firewalls, virus utilities, virtual private networks, network appliances, and a dozen other tools. Each can offer some assurance that your Internet site and network is safe. What about more basic issues? For example, what steps can you take to secure your privacy while surfing online? As with data protection, there are also several methods available for protecting your personal privacy on the Internet. This chapter looks at these methods.
Unless you take steps to prevent it, your identity will eventually be exposed if you surf the Internet. That exposure will manifest in different forms and degrees depending on many factors, including
Your network connection
Your browser
Your public traffic
The plug-ins and applications you support
These variables expose you to two different types of intelligence:
Human intelligence
Network intelligence
Let’s examine each in turn.
Human beings can spy on you. Through such spying, they can discover your identity, track your movements, or even catch you in a criminal act. Of all forms of intelligence, human intelligence is the oldest. (In fact, spies often muse that human intelligence is the world’s oldest profession.)
Human intelligence comes in two flavors, collective and penetrative:
The Internet is a superb tool for collective intelligence. For example, consider your posts to Usenet. These are available to the public, to persons known and unknown. Others can track your messages closely and can learn a great deal about you by doing so. Naturally, this presents law-enforcement agencies with a unique opportunity. Simply by using search engines, they can conduct collective intelligence at a whim.
This is completely different from the situation 25 years ago. To illustrate how different, let me take you back to the early 1970s. Here in America, the ’70s were filled with political turmoil. Many radical organizations emerged, and some advocated violent overthrow of the government. U.S. intelligence agencies responded by conducting collective and penetrative operations. These operations were carried out by human beings. For example, to identify supporters of the Students for a Democratic Society, the FBI would send agents on foot. (These agents might have been employed by the FBI or they might have been civilian informers. It didn’t really matter.) Such agents would mix with the crowds at political rallies and record license plate numbers or gather names. Later, field agents would connect faces, fingerprints, and addresses to those names by running license plate files, retrieving criminal records, or questioning still other informants.
Those methods are no longer necessary. Instead, the Internet enables intelligence agencies to monitor public sentiment from the comfort of their own offices. Furthermore, they can do this without violating any law. No search warrant is required to study someone’s activity on the Internet. This means any agency can freely utilize tools and software available on the Internet to collect data on anyone. Likewise, no warrant is required before using the Internet to compile lists of people who might be involved in illegal or seditious activity. A warrant is only required when the data needed resides on private systems, such as an ISP. After obtaining a subpoena, an intelligence agency can then gain access to ISP log files, any email traffic (if available), and any other digital data pertaining to the individual.
If you harbor radical political views, you should keep them to yourself. (Either that or gain a decent education in cryptography.) Here’s why: Today’s search engines can be used to isolate all Usenet traffic between a particular class of individuals (militia members, for example). You can bet your last dollar that Kirk Lyons (a white supremacist lawyer whose clients have been a “Who’s Who” of the radical right) has been monitored closely by the FBI.
Be forewarned: Usenet is not a forum to exercise your right to free speech. Instead, it’s a place where you are exposed, naked to the world. Usenet is just the beginning. Six out of every ten Web sites you visit track your movements. (Probably eight out of ten big commercial sites try to.) Advances in digital snooping make it possible for nearly anyone with a computer to become an electronic Peeping Tom.
In 2000, the FBI introduced DCS1000, a system that, when plugged into a computer network, captures and tracks all network communication through that system. DCS1000, formerly known as Carnivore, has created a large controversy with privacy advocates. One of the biggest reasons for this is simply that DCS1000 is not designed to monitor just a single individual (or select individuals) whom the FBI might be legally wiretapping. It captures all communications on the systems that the investigators plug it into. With the help of the Freedom of Information Act, about 600 documents relating to DCS1000 were released. From this information, SecurityFocus.com has put together an interesting overview:
Newly declassified documents obtained by Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) under the Freedom of Information Act reveal that DCS1000 can monitor all of a target user’s Internet traffic, and in conjunction with other FBI tools, can reconstruct Web pages exactly as a surveillance target saw them while surfing the Web.
This is fine for tracking and monitoring illegal activities of people suspected of criminal activity, but what about all the innocent users that have unknowingly had their privacy violated? The FBI doesn’t let the public know what it does with the data gathered from DCS1000.
Beyond DCS1000, the FBI has been working on another system called Magic Lantern. Magic Lantern is known as a keyboard sniffer that logs every keystroke. What is not known is how it gets on the suspect’s computer. Some rumors say it is a virus, whereas others say that the FBI can get a court order to install it on a machine by entering a home without the owner’s knowledge. In either case, it’s a scary proposition that the FBI could be watching your every computer action without your knowledge.
Before Web browsers existed, you could only access the Internet from a command-line interface. This interface was bare bones and intimidating to most people. Browsers changed that by turning the Internet into a point-and-click paradise; anyone with a mouse could easily navigate the World Wide Web. The results were phenomenal. Indeed, practically overnight, millions of users flocked to the Web.
When humanity rushed to the Web, marketing agencies took notice. This question was immediately posed: How can we use the Internet to make a buck? Companies came up with various answers, including electronic commerce. (In electronic commerce, consumers buy products or services over the Web, right from their own homes.)
From the start, there was a strong drive to develop methods of tracking not only consumer purchases, but also consumer interests. Many such methods emerged by 1993, and today there are more than a dozen. In the following pages, you’ll learn how your identity is ferreted out, bit by bit, by persons known and unknown.
I’ll begin by making a blanket statement and one you should never forget: The Internet’s architecture was not designed with personal privacy in mind. In fact, there are many standard Internet utilities designed specifically for tracing and identifying users.
In a moment we’ll examine some and how they work. First, however, we need to cover how user information is stored on servers.
There are two universal forms of identification on the Internet: your email address and your IP address. Both reveal your identity. At a minimum, both serve as good starting places for a spy.
Your email address in particular can reveal your real name. Here’s why: Even if your Internet service provider uses Windows to host a few Web sites, almost all ISPs use Unix as their base platform. That’s because Unix (coupled with a protocol called RADIUS) makes management of dial-up accounts very easy. (It also provides better mail support than Windows if you are dealing with hundreds or even thousands of accounts.)
On the Unix system, user information is often stored in a file called passwd, which is located in the /etc directory. This file contains user login names, usernames, and occasionally, user passwords (although only in encrypted form). An entry from the passwd file looks like this:
jdoe:x:65536:1:John Doe:/export/home/jdoe:/sbin/sh
If you examine the entry closely, you’ll see that the fields are colon-delimited. Here you should be concerned with fields 1, 5, and 6. Using the entry as an example, those fields are as follows:
jdoeYour usernameJohn DoeYour real name/export/home/jdoeYour home directory
This information is vital, and Unix uses it for many tasks. For example, this information is double-checked each time you log in, each time you receive mail, and each time you log out. Unfortunately, the information is also usually available to the general public through a utility called finger.
finger is a service common to Unix systems. Its purpose is to provide user information to remote hosts, and like all TCP/IP services, finger is based on the client/server model.
When a Unix system first boots, it loads nearly a dozen remote services (for example, a Web server, an FTP server, a Telnet server, and so forth). The finger server is called fingerd and is commonly referred to as the finger daemon.
The finger daemon listens for local or remote requests for user information. When it receives such a request, it forwards whatever information is currently available on the target. (The target in this case is you.)
On Unix, a finger request can be issued from a command prompt. The results from the finger server are then printed to the local terminal. Here’s what a command-prompt finger request looks like:
$finger -l [email protected]
The command translates into plain English like this: “Look up jdoe and tell me everything you can about him.” When a user issues such a request, the finger daemon at john-doe.com is contacted. It searches through the system for jdoe, and ultimately, it returns this information:
Login name: jdoe In real life: John Doe Directory: / Shell: /sbin/sh Last login Tue May 18 19:53 on pts/22 New mail received Mon May 18 04:05:58 1997; unread since Mon May 18 03:20:43 1997 No Plan.
For years, this information was available only to Unix and VAX/VMS users. Not any more. Today, there are finger clients (programs that perform finger lookups) for all platforms. Windows NT/2000/XP has one built in that can be accessed from a DOS window. Table 8.1 lists a few.
NOTE
To finger someone with the built-in finger client from an NT box, simply open a command prompt window and type [email protected].
These days, most system administrators deny remote finger requests to their networks, even internally. When network finger requests are allowed, they are often unrestricted and unregulated. This permits remote users to identify not only you, but also everyone on the system. To do so, remote users issue the following command:
finger @my_target_host.com
The @ symbol works precisely as an asterisk does in regular expression searches. In plain English, the command says this: “Tell me about all users currently logged on.”
When writing this chapter, I wanted to give you an example, so I fingered all users at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Here is the result from that query:
finger @reed.edu [reed.edu] Login Name TTY Idle When Office copeland D. Jeremy Copeland *p1 12 Tue 19:24 Box 169 775 6945 boothbyl Lawrence E. Boothby p3 121d Sun 09:05 mab Mark Bedau p4 Tue 19:32 copeland D. Jeremy Copeland p6 4 Tue 19:29 Box 169 775 6945 slam Greg (don't call me p7 13d Wed 08:36 Box 470 or Coleman slam Greg (don't call me p8 18d Fri 07:29 Box 470 or Coleman mayer Ray Mayer *p9 2d Mon 16:59 (fac) mcclellj Joshua J McClellan pf 4d Fri 14:45 (813) slam Greg (don't call me pe 6d Wed 08:19 Box 470 or Coleman mcclellj Joshua J McClellan q0 4d Fri 16:12 (813) moored Dustin B Moore q2 6:32 Tue 13:05 (1172) obonfim Osiel Bonfim q3 3:02 Mon 16:07 rahkolar Rahua Rahkola q6 46 Tue 18:34 obonfim Osiel Bonfim q9 2:59 Tue 09:45 mcclellj Joshua J McClellan qb 4d Fri 15:00 (813) jwitte John Witte *qc 4:00 Tue 15:14 lillieb Ben Lillie r3 58 Tue 13:11 P04 szutst Tobi A. Szuts *r7 5 Tue 14:51 (819) mcclard Ron McClard *re 1:22 Mon 10:55 (x218) queue Print Queue Display qd 8d Mon 15:42 jimfix James D. Fix *qf 32 Tue 13:04 mcclellj Joshua J McClellan r6 3:50 Mon 10:47 (813)
It doesn’t look like these folks have much privacy, does it? Well, here’s a fact: 99% of listings I checked around the Internet revealed the users’ real names. If you think that listing only your company name will hide your identity, think again. Take a look at the first line of the preceding output:
copeland D. Jeremy Copeland *p1 12 Tue 19:24 Box 169 775 6945
Here, as you can see, we already have this person’s full name, his login name, email address ([email protected]), and a phone number. Using Google (http://www.google.com), I found his personal Web site at Reed College. I can also safely assume from the location of the college that he is in Portland, Oregon. A search on WorldPages (http://www.worldpages.com) gave me four individuals matching this person, all with home phone numbers and personal addresses. Not a lot of personal privacy here, is there?
In many cases, by starting with finger and ending with WorldPages, you can find someone’s home address (along with a map for directions) in fewer than 30 seconds. If someone tells you that finger doesn’t present a privacy issue, give her a copy of this book. finger can bring a total stranger right to your doorstep.
There are solutions for the finger problem. But, before you bother, you should check to see whether you are a viable target.
There are two ways to determine whether you are a viable finger target:
Perform a finger query on yourself.
Check the
/etc/passwdfile on your ISP’s server.
To check from a shell prompt, issue one of the following commands:
grep your_username /etc/passwd ypcat passwd || cat /etc/passwd | grep your_username niscat passwd.org_dir | grep your username
These commands will print the information in the server’s /etc/passwd file. The output will look like this:
jdoe:x:65536:1:John Doe:/export/home/jdoe:/sbin/sh
If you are a viable finger target, there are several things you can do to minimize your exposure:
Use the utility
chfnto alter the finger information available to outsiders.If
chfnis not available, request that the system administrator change your information.Cancel your current account and start a new one.
NOTE
You might be puzzled why I suggest canceling your account. Here’s why: It was you who provided the information in the /etc/passwd account. You provided that information when you signed up. If you can’t access chfn and your sysadmin refuses to change this information, it will remain there until you cancel your account. If you cancel your account and create a new one, you can dictate what information the server has on you.
On the other hand, if you don’t care about getting fingered, but you simply want to know who’s doing it, you need MasterPlan.
MasterPlan (written by Laurion Burchall) takes a more aggressive approach by identifying who is trying to finger you. Each time a finger query is detected, MasterPlan captures the hostname and user ID of the fingering party. This information is stored in a file called finger_log. MasterPlan also determines how often you are fingered, so you can detect whether someone is trying to clock you. (In clocking, user A attempts to discern the habits of user B via various network utilities, including finger and the r commands.)
TIP
The r commands consist of a suite of network utilities that can glean information about users on remote hosts.
In clocking, the snooping party uses an automated script to finger his target every x number of minutes or hours. Reasons for such probing can be diverse. One is to build a profile of the target: When does the user log in? How often does the user check mail? From where does the user usually log in? From these queries, a nosy party can determine other possible points on the network where you can be found.
Here’s an example: A cracker I know wanted to intercept the email of a nationally renowned female journalist who covers hacking stories. This journalist had several accounts and frequently logged in to one from another. (In other words, she chained her connections. In this way, she was trying to keep her private email address a secret.)
By running a clocking script on the journalist, the cracker was able to identify her private, unpublished email address. He was also able to compromise her network and ultimately capture her mail. The mail consisted of discussions between the journalist and a software engineer in England. The subject matter concerned a high-profile cracking case in the news. (That mail was later distributed to crackers’ groups across the Internet.)
MasterPlan can identify clocking patterns, at least with respect to finger queries. The utility is small and easy to configure. The C source is included, and the distribution is known to compile cleanly on most Unix systems. One nice amenity for Linux users is that a precompiled binary comes with most distributions. The standard distribution of MasterPlan is available at the following address:
ftp://ftp.netspace.org/pub/Software/Unix/masterplan.tar.Z
The Linux-compiled version is available at this address:
ftp://ftp.netspace.org/pub/Software/Unix/masterplan-linux.tar.Z
NOTE
MasterPlan does not prevent others from fingering you; it simply identifies those parties and how often they finger you. Unfortunately, as of this date, MasterPlan is only available for Unix and is no longer maintained.
After you shield yourself against finger queries, you might feel that your name is safe from prying eyes. Wrong again. finger is just the beginning. There are a dozen other ways your email address and your name reveal information about you.
Even if your provider forbids finger requests, your name is still easy to obtain. When snoops try to finger you and discover finger isn’t running, they turn to your mail server. In most cases, servers accept Telnet connections to port 25 (the port that sendmail runs on). Such a connection looks like this:
220 shell. Sendmail SMI-8.6/SMI-SVR4 ready at Wed, 19 Feb 1997 07:17:18 -0800
If outsiders can reach the prompt, they can quickly obtain your name by issuing the following command:
expn username The expn command expands usernames into email addresses and real names. The response will typically look like this:
username <username@target_of_probe.com> Real Name
The first field will report your username or user ID, followed by your email address, and finally, your “real” name.
System administrators can disable the expn function. If the expn function is operable, nosy individuals can still get your real name, if it is available. Again, the best policy is to remove your real name from the passwd file.
NOTE
Unfortunately, even if the expn function has been disabled, the snooping party can sometimes still verify the existence of your account using the vrfy function (if your server supports it).
As you can see, finger poses a unique privacy problem—but that’s just the beginning.
With the rise of electronic commerce, various methods to track your movements have been developed. Three key methods are implemented through your Web browser:
IP address and cache snooping
Cookies
Banner ads and Web bugs
By themselves, these techniques seem harmless enough. However, if you want to remain anonymous, you must take steps to safeguard yourself against them. Let’s examine each in turn.
Each time you visit a Web server, you leave behind a trail. This trail is recorded in different ways on different servers, but it is always recorded. A typical log entry on Unix (running Apache) looks like this:
153.35.38.245 [01/May/1998:18:12:10 -0700] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 401 362
Note the first entry (the IP address). All Web server packages are capable of recording visitor IP addresses. However, most Web servers can also record other information, including your hostname and even your username. To see what a Web server can tell about you, visit this site:
http://www.anonymizer.com/snoop/test_ip.shtml
This site will do a seven-part analysis on your vulnerability. It can detect your IP address, the last Web site you visited, how many Web sites you have visited, where you are physically, your browser type, OS, and even possibly grab your clipboard if you are using IE.
Using these logs and scripts, Webmasters can precisely pinpoint where you are, what your network address is, and where you’ve been. Are you uncomfortable yet? Now quickly examine cookies.
Cookies. The word might sound inviting to you, but not to me—I value my privacy very much. In the past, many reporters have written articles about cookies, attempting to allay the public’s fears. In such articles, they minimize the influence of cookies, dismissing them as harmless. Are cookies harmless? Not in my opinion.
Cookies (which Netscape calls Persistent Client State HTTP Cookies) are used to store information about you as you browse a Web page. The folks at Netscape explain it this way:
This simple mechanism provides a powerful new tool that enables a host of new types of applications to be written for Web-based environments. Shopping applications can now store information about the currently selected items; for fee services can send back registration information and free the client from retyping a user-id on next connection; sites can store per-user preferences on the client and have the client supply those preferences every time that site is connected to.
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The article from which the previous quote is excerpted, “Persistent Client State HTTP Cookies,” can be found at http://wp.netscape.com/newsref/std/cookie_spec.html.
The cookie concept is like getting your hand stamped at a dance club that serves cocktails. You can roam the club, have some drinks, dance the floor, and even go outside for a few minutes. As long as the stamp is on your hand, you will not have to pay again, nor will your access be restricted. Similarly, cookies enable Web servers to “remember” you, your password, your interests, and so on. That way, when you return, this information is automatically retrieved. The issue concerning cookies, though, isn’t that the information is retrieved. The controversy is about where the information is retrieved from—your hard disk drive.
The process works like this: When you visit a Web page, the server writes a cookie to your hard disk drive. This cookie is stored in a special file.
NOTE
Windows users can find the cookies file in varying places, depending on their browser type and their version of Windows. In older distributions cookies are kept in a file called cookies.txt. In newer distributions (and with Microsoft Internet Explorer), cookies are stored individually in the directory cookies, which is usually stored along with your user profile. (On Macintosh systems, the file is called MagicCookie.)
Here are some typical entries from a cookie file:
www.webspan.net FALSE /~frys FALSE 859881600 worldohackf 2.netscape.com TRUE / FALSE 946684799 NETSCAPE_ID 1000e010,107ea15f.adobe.com TRUE / FALSE 946684799 INTERSE 207.171.18.182 6852855142083822www.ictnet.com FALSE / FALSE 946684799 Apache pm3a-4326561855491810745.microsoft.com TRUE / FALSE 937422000 MC1 GUID=260218f482a111d0889e08002bb74f65.msn.com TRUE / FALSE 937396800 MC1 ID=260218f482a111d0889e08002bb74f65comsecltd.com FALSE / FALSE 1293753600 EGSOFT_ID 207.171.18.176-3577227984.29104071 .amazon.com TRUE / FALSE 858672000 session-id-time 855894626.amazon.com TRUE / FALSE 858672000 session-id 0738-6510633-772498
This cookie file is a real one, pulled from an associate’s hard disk drive. You will see that under the GUID (field number 6), the leading numbers are an IP address. (I have added a space between the IP address and the remaining portion of the string so that you can easily identify the IP. In practice, however, the string is unbroken.) From this, you can see that setting a cookie generally involves recording your IP address.
Advocates of cookies insist that they are harmless, cannot assist in identifying the user, and are therefore benign. That is not true, as explained by D. Kristol and L. Montulli in RFC 2109:
An origin server could create a Set-Cookie header to track the path of a user through the server. Users may object to this behavior as an intrusive accumulation of information, even if their identity is not evident. (Identity might become evident if a user subsequently fills out a form that contains identifying information.)
Today, cookies are routinely used for user authentication. This is disturbing and was immediately recognized as a problem. As expressed in RFC 2109:
User agents should allow the user to control cookie destruction. An infrequently used cookie may function as a “preferences file” for network applications, and a user may wish to keep it even if it is the least-recently-used cookie. One possible implementation would be an interface that allows the permanent storage of a cookie through a checkbox (or conversely, its immediate destruction).
Despite these early warnings about cookies, mainstream Web browsers still ship with the Accept Cookies option enabled. Worse still, although most browsers have an option that warns you before accepting a cookie, this option is also disabled by default. Netscape Communicator 4, for example, ships this way. If you use Netscape Communicator, take a moment to go to the Edit menu and choose Preferences. After you have the Preference option window open, click Advanced. In Netscape 6 and higher, as well as Mozilla, the settings can be found in the menu File, Preferences, Privacy & Security, Cookies. Microsoft Internet Explorer ships in basically the same state. To disable cookies in Internet Explorer, click Tools, and then select Internet Options from the list. A new window will open. Click the Security tab. You can change the security level to High, or click Custom Level, where you will find the options to disable cookies in Internet Explorer.
Think about that for a moment: How many new computer owners are aware that cookies exist? Shouldn’t they at least be informed that such intelligence gathering is going on? I think so.
Cookies can easily be managed and defeated using cookie cutters. These are programs that give you control over cookies (such as viewing them, deleting them, or conditionally refusing them). The easiest solution is to use Netscape 7 or Mozilla as your browser, because the cookie-cutting functionality is built into the browser. Table 8.2 provides names and locations of several cookie cutters that are useful with other browsers.
Table 8.2. Cookies Cutters, Their Platforms, and Their Locations
Cutter | Platform | Location |
|---|---|---|
Cookie Pal | Windows | |
Cookie Cruncher | Windows | |
NoMoreCookies | Mac OS | http://downloads.zdnet.co.uk/downloads/detail/1002-2271-880008.html |
ScapeGoat | Mac OS | http://www.zdnet.com.au/downloads/mac/swinfo/0,2000036795,899153,00.htm |
NOTE
Windows and Mac OS users can also make the cookies file or directory read-only. This will prevent any cookies from being written to the drive. Unix users should delete the cookies.txt file and place a symbolic link there that points to /dev/null.
If you want to learn more about cookies, check out some of the following articles:
“A Cookies Monster?” Stephen T. Maher, Law Products Magazine. http://www.usual.com/article6.htm.
Cookies and Privacy FAQ. http://www.cookiecentral.com/n_cookie_faq.htm.
“Are Cookie Files Public Record?” Dan Goodin, CNET. http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,17170,00.html.
“How Web Servers’ Cookies Threaten Your Privacy.” Junkbusters. http://www.junkbusters.com/ht/en/cookies.html.
HTTP State Management Mechanism (RFC 2109, a document discussing the technical aspects of the cookie mechanism.) http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/http/rfc2109.txt.
You should also know this: Cookies and the test-cgi script are not the only ways that Webmasters grab information about you. Other, less conspicuous techniques exist. Many JavaScript and Perl scripts can “get” your IP address. This type of code also can get your browser type, your operating system, and so forth. The following is an example in JavaScript:
<script language=javascript>
function Get_Browser() {
var appName = navigator.appName;
var appVersion = navigator.appVersion;
document.write(appName + " " + appVersion.substring (0,appVersion.indexOf(" ")));
}
</script> JavaScript will get the browser and its version. Scripts like this are used at thousands of sites across the Internet. A very popular one is the “Book ‘em, Dan-O” script. This script (written in the Perl programming language) will get the time you accessed the page, your browser type and version, and your IP address.
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The “Book ‘em, Dan-O” script was written by an individual named Spider. It is currently available for download at Matt’s Script Archive at http://worldwidemart.com/scripts/dano.shtml.
Similar programs are available in a wide range of programming languages, including Java. You will find a Java program designed specifically for this purpose here:
You’ve no doubt visited plenty of Web sites with advertisements. The Internet has become a marketing executive’s dream come true, with nearly unlimited methods of tracking and recording information on consumers. Today, nearly every popular Web site is littered with annoying banner ads, pop-up ads, Web bugs, and targeted marketing. The only cost is your own personal privacy. Whenever ads are mentioned in this section, it is referring to both banner ads and popup ads. The major difference is that pop-ups are more annoying. Ads are a necessary evil of the Internet economy, but did you know that these innocent images can also be used to track users and transmit demographics back to the advertising companies responsible for them?
The methods vary, but it generally works like this: A user visits a popular Web site with an ad that has the capability to track. As the page loads, it will grab the required image directly off of a Web server run by the advertising company. Every time this happens, the ad server has the capability to log a great deal of information about who is loading that image. Using cookies, sophisticated JavaScript, and CGI, the unwitting visitor might be sending nothing more that her IP or every piece of personal information she might have previously submitted to another Web site. It is also possible for the remote ad server to set a cookie on the user’s computer to help it track that person in better detail.
The latest trend in violating your Web-surfing privacy comes from Web bugs. A Web bug is usually a small, transparent .gif, 1×1 pixels in size, that works in a similar manner to a tracking ad. When the page loads, the invisible Web bug also loads, triggering the same transfer of information that the ads can send. The biggest difference is simply stealth. You can’t see or detect a Web bug, unless you look at the source for that particular Web page. Take a look at this example from the ZDNet Web site:
<img src="http://ads3.zdnet.com/i/g=r001&c=a56998&idx=2001.01.04.21.48.58/ http://images.zdnet.com/adverts/imp/dotclear.gif">
This is the HTML code to display an image on the ZDNet Web page. This, however, is no ordinary image. It’s a Web bug used to track people visiting the Web site. Notice the height and width parameters, and the lack of a border or an ALT entry. This invisible image, when loaded, triggers the ad server at ZDNet to record whatever information they programmed it to retrieve. ZDNet is not alone in this behavior. I simply loaded the first Web site that came to mind and found this Web bug.
TIP
There are several good articles online about the proliferation of Web bugs and banner ads with tracking capabilities. Be sure to check out “Nearly Undetectable Tracking Device Raises Concerns” by Stefanie Olsen at http://news.cnet.com/news//0-1007-200-2247960.html.
What do these companies need this information for? Why do they violate your privacy without your permission or consent? Marketing. Marketing and selling products to consumers requires detailed demographics and statistics. With this information, the advertising companies are better able to target a specific group to sell them something. If you visit a lot of Web sites related to computers, for instance, you will notice that the ads you see will be designed to get you to buy computer-related products and services. Also, a high-traffic Web site can make a good sum of money by enabling advertisers to post ads and Web bugs on their pages.
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If you want to see if Web bugs are being used on Web pages you are visiting, take a look at Bugnosis (http://www.bugnosis.org/). Bugnosis integrates into Internet Explorer version 5 or higher. It will highlight and explain Web bugs.
Thankfully, there are many solutions for combating intrusive cookies, ads, and Web bugs. Today, there are several software programs that you can proxy your Web browser traffic through to block this material. A proxy is a type of software that acts as a sort of middleman between you and the Internet. Your Internet traffic flows through it, and depending on the proxy’s functionality, it is sped up, filtered, or redirected. My personal favorite is the Internet Junkbuster. Junkbuster’s developers have also recently released a consumer version of Junkbuster called Guidescope, which is aimed at the general public and is easy to install and use. Guidescope offers the same level of protection as Junkbuster, but it is designed to be a lot more user friendly and easier to install and maintain.
Internet Junkbuster acts as a proxy server for all your Web surfing traffic. As you load Web pages, it inspects the incoming code for common patterns used by banner ads and Web bugs. Before this code ever reaches your Web browser, it is stripped from the HTML, effectively sterilizing the privacy-invading banners and bugs. Not only does this help safeguard your privacy, but blocking banner advertisements also significantly speeds up Web browsing, and you will find it is a lot easier to concentrate on the information you came to see, rather than flashy obnoxious Web advertising. Internet Junkbuster and Guidescope can also be configured to block cookies.
NOTE
If your privacy is important, you should take a few minutes to take a look at the Junkbuster Web site. They provide a great deal of information on proactively protecting yourself from invasive advertising in email, postal mail, telemarketing, and other means.
More information on Internet Junkbuster and Guidescope can be found at http://www.junkbusters.com and http://www.guidescope.com.
Another option is to install your own local proxy server. The Proxomitron (http://proxomitron.org/) is an excellent one. Some of its features include blocking banner ads, lying about the type of browser you have, and removing JavaScripts.
If you just want to get rid of pop-up ads, software is available for that as well. The first anti-pop-up measure is to use Netscape 7 or Mozilla as your browser. To eliminate pop-ups, go to Edit, Preferences, Advanced, Scripts & Windows. In that menu, uncheck Open Unrequested Windows (also known as pop-ups). For good measure, while you’re there, uncheck Move or Resize Existing Windows and Raise or Lower Windows. If you are using IE or an old version of Netscape, you can eliminate pop-ups using a software such as Popup Ad Filter (http://www.meaya.com/?xfx) instead.
It should be noted that some companies (for example, http://www.anti-leech.com) are trying to sell products to Webmasters that are geared toward eliminating your privacy. These products try to detect that you are blocking their ads, and if so, refuse to let you look at their site. My advice is not to use those sites and let the Webmaster know that.
The newest trend in Internet privacy invasion is spyware, also known as adware. Spyware is software that is usually included in some free software you have downloaded. The spyware component monitors your computer activity and periodically sends reports back to an advertiser about your behavior, so they can target their ads better to you. It’s obvious, in theory, that the spyware could read your private email or do anything else it wants on your system.
If you have loaded software such as RealPlayer, Kazaa, or GoZilla, you might have spyware on your computer. The good news is that you can do something about it.
The first strategy is to become knowledgeable about what you have loaded that might be spyware. A couple of Web sites can help you: SpyChecker (http://www.spychecker.com/) and SpyWare List (http://www.tom-cat.com/spybase/spylist.html). Both sites have lists of spyware. However, it makes sense to check both. SpyChecker says the RealPlayer 7 is not spyware, whereas SpyWare List says it is.
If you would prefer a program that can search your computer for spyware, try Ad-aware from http://www.lavasoftusa.com/. Ad-aware is a little more advanced. Most programs that include spyware buy their components from a handful of vendors. Ad-aware will search your computer (much like an antivirus program) and detect what spyware components are loaded on your machine. It then gives you the option of removal. You can also register Ad-aware, and when you do, you get a program called Ad-watch, which watches your computer in real-time and lets you know when some spyware has been installed on your machine.
By having Ad-aware remove the spyware, the programs that included the spyware might not work any longer. Likewise, if you find the package you are using on the lists mentioned previously, you might be faced with a tough choice. The good news is that it is almost always possible to find a similar free package that does not include spyware. The Ad-aware people have a partial list at http://www.lavasoftusa.com/more.html.
Although I’m not sure of the legalities, there is another option if you want to use your favorite software without the spyware. Some hackers out on the Internet grab spyware-enabled programs and then disable the spyware components. One prime example is Kazaalite (http://www.kazaalite.com), which is Kazaa with the spyware removed.
Personal firewall software, such as ZoneAlarm (http://www.zonealarm.com) can help as well. Most personal firewall packages can be configured to block the outgoing messages from spyware. In some cases, it may break the spyware-enabled program.
Finally, there is my personal favorite. The Kazzalite site also has a special hosts file in which you can add to the hosts file on your machine. This hosts file contains the domain names for many spyware and banner ad tracking sites. However, instead of containing their correct IP address, every IP address is set to 127.0.0.1, which means the local computer. Therefore, whenever the spyware tries to contact the spyware site with your information, it will fail. Also, after loading this file, you’ll notice error messages and block images on some Web pages as well, because banner ads and Web bugs are failing.
Earlier in this chapter, I claimed that your email address could expose you to spying on Usenet. In this section, I will prove it.
Your email address is like any other text string. If it appears on (or within the source code of) a Web page, it is reachable by search engines. When a spy has your email address, it’s all over but the screaming. In fact, perhaps most disturbing of all, your email address and name (after they are paired) can reveal other accounts that you might have.
To provide you with a practical example, I pondered a possible target. I was looking for someone who changed email addresses frequently and routinely used others as fronts. Fronts are third parties who post information for you. By using a front, you avoid being pinned down, because it’s the front’s email address that appears, not your own.
I decided to do a bit of research on a controversial person, Kirk D. Lyons of the Southern Legal Resource Center (SLRC). This name might not be too familiar to many people right away. Mr. Lyons is an outspoken attorney with a history of defending right-wing and extremist groups. He has also been a prominent voice and an active participant in several newsworthy incidents, especially in the past 10 years. Mr. Lyons has been directly involved with issues relating to the Oklahoma federal building bombing and Timothy McVeigh, the Ruby Ridge incident with Randy Weaver, and the Waco stand-off, to name a few.
NOTE
The following exercise is not an invasion of Mr. Lyons’ privacy. All information was obtained from publicly available databases on the Internet. Instead, this exercise is very similar to the results of a June 1997 Time magazine article about Internet privacy. In that article, a Time reporter tracked California Senator Dianne Feinstein. The reporter did an extraordinary job and even managed to ascertain Senator Feinstein’s Social Security number. The article, “My Week as an Internet Gumshoe,” is by Noah Robischon. At the time of this writing, it is available online at http://www.pathfinder.com/time/magazine/1997/dom/970602/technology.my_wek.html.
The first step in tracking an individual is to capture their email addresses. To find Kirk D. Lyons’s email address, any garden-variety search engine will do, although AltaVista and Google have the most malleable designs. That’s where I started. (Remember that I have never met Mr. Lyons and know very little about him.)
I began my search with AltaVista (http://www.altavista.com). AltaVista is one of the most powerful search engines available on the Internet and is provided as a public service by CMGI, Inc. It accepts various types of queries that can be directed toward WWW pages (HTML), images and video, and other forms of digital media. I followed up using Google (http://www.google.com).
I chose AltaVista for one reason: It performs case-sensitive, exact-match regular expression searches. That means that it will match precisely what you search for. (In other words, there are no “close” matches when you request such a search. This feature enables you to narrow your results to a single page out of millions.)
To force such a precise search, you must enclose your search string in double-quotation marks. I began by searching the Web for this string:
"Kirk D. Lyons"
This search returned nearly 200 matches, and I started sorting them looking for anything interesting. Most of what I found were various articles and publications either about Mr. Lyons or written by him. I was able to discover an older, shared email address used by Mr. Lyons and one of his colleagues, [email protected]. Searching for just this email address yielded very little, so I turned to Usenet postings. Using http://groups.google.com/, I was able to search thousands of postings. I came across some by Kirk himself using the previous email address. What was interesting here was that the email header information was left intact, which gives quite a bit of information:
Return-Path: [email protected] Received: from lexington.ioa.net (IDENT:[email protected] [208.131.128.7]) by mail.hal-pc.org (8.9.1/8.9.0) with ESMTP id DAA09388 for <[email protected]>; Thu, 4 Nov 1999 03:23:08 -0559 (CST) Received: from 1861 (ppp227.arden.dialup.ioa.com [205.138.38.236]) by lexington.ioa.net (8.9.3/8.9.3) with SMTP id EAA29654; Thu, 4 Nov 1999 04:19:27 -0500 Message-ID: <1bed01bf26a5$a5ea0560$cb268acd@1861> To: <[email protected]> From: "Kirk D. Lyons or Dr. Neill H. Payne" <[email protected]> Subject: HELP
From this, it is possible to determine who is using this address, and where they were connecting from and which service provider they were using to send the message. I can also determine that this is a dial-up account, possibly a home user account in Arden, North Carolina. Further investigation helped me discover that this individual is heavily involved in Civil War re-enactment. This led me to discover Mr. Lyons’s sideline business, Different Drummer, including more detailed information including the address, phone number, fax number, and email for this business.
This might not seem like much information, but, in reality, it is enough that I could easily start pulling up business and tax records, property information, and other public data on Mr. Lyons. There is very little limit on how far this investigation could be taken. In just a few minutes using freely available Internet Web site-based searching, I was able to gather a considerable amount of information about Mr. Lyons.
That might not initially seem very important. You are probably thinking, “So what?” However, think back to what I wrote at the beginning of this chapter. Twenty years ago, the FBI would have spent thousands of dollars (and secured a dozen wire-taps) to discover the same information.
Usenet is a superb tool for building models of human networks. (These are groups of people who think alike.) If you belong to such a group (and maintain controversial or unpopular views), do not post those views to Usenet.
Even though you can prevent your Usenet posts from being archived by making x-no-archive: yes the first line of your post, you cannot prevent others from copying the post and storing it on a Web server. By posting unpopular political views to Usenet (and inviting others of like mind to respond), you are inadvertently revealing your associations to the world. If your posts are archived, they might be available for all eternity, thanks to the folks at http://groups.google.com.
The DejaNews search engine was a specialized tool designed solely to search Usenet. In early 2001, Google purchased the DejaNews service and renamed it Google Groups. The archive goes back to 1981 and contains 700 million messages.
DejaNews has advanced indexing functions as well. For example, you can automatically build a profile on the author of a Usenet article. (That is, the engine will produce a list of newsgroups that the target has posted to recently.) In this way, others can instantly identify your interests. Worse still, they can actually find you.
To recap, assume that although your real name does not appear on Usenet postings, it does appear in the /etc/passwd file on the Unix server that you use as a gateway to the Internet. Here are the steps someone must take to find you:
The snooping party sees your post to Usenet. Your email address is in plain view, but your name is not.
The snooping party tries to finger your address, but as it happens, your provider prohibits finger requests.
The snooping party telnets to port 25 of your server. There, he issues the
expncommand and obtains your real name.
Having gotten that information, the snooping party next needs to find the state you live in. For this, he turns to the WHOIS service.
The WHOIS service contains domain registration records of all American, nonmilitary Internet sites. This registration information contains detailed information on each Internet site, including domain name, server addresses, technical contacts, the telephone number, and the address. In the past, the WHOIS information was all in one database, but since there are now multiple domain registrars, it is distributed.
The first thing you’ll need is a WHOIS client. If you are on Unix, it mostly likely will already be available to you. If you are on Windows, you’ll need to download one such as WHOIS for Windows (http://www.compulink.co.uk/~net-services/spam/whois.htm). On the Mac, you can use WhatRoute (http://www.mac.org/internet/whatroute/).
I am going to show you how to use WHOIS by looking at the ISP Netcom. First, you’ll need to go to the WHOIS page at InterNIC (http://www.internic.net/whois.html) with your Web browser. Enter the domain name (that is, netcom.com) and submit. One of the fields you will see is the Whois Server. In this case, it is whois.networksolutions.com.
Now you’ll use your WHOIS client to query whois.networksolutions.com for netcom.com. If you are using the Unix WHOIS, type whois –h whois.networksolutions.com netcom.com . You will get the following response:
Registrant:
NETCOM On-Line Communication Services, Inc (NETCOM-DOM)
1430 West Peachtree St
Suite 400
Atlanta, GA 30309
Domain Name: NETCOM.COM
Administrative Contact:
MindSpring Abuse (MA127-ORG) [email protected]
MindSpring Enterprises
1430 West Peachtree St NW
Atlanta, GA 30309
US
404-815-0770
Fax- - 404-815-8805
Technical Contact:
Hostmaster (HOS272-ORG) [email protected]
MindSpring Enterprises, Inc.
1430 West Peachtree Street NE
Suite 400
Atlanta, GA 30309
US
404-815-0770
Fax- 404-815-8805
Record expires on 03-Feb-2003.
Record created on 01-Feb-1991.
Database last updated on 15-Sep-2002 09:19:12 EDT.
Domain servers in listed order:
SPEAKEASY.EARTHLINK.NET 207.69.188.200
HEARSAY.EARTHLINK.NET 207.69.188.201 Take a good look at the Netcom WHOIS information. From this, the snooping party discovers that Netcom is in Georgia. (Note the location at the top of the WHOIS return listing, as well as the telephone points of contact for the technical personnel.)
Armed with this information, the snooping party proceeds to http://www.worldpages.com/. WorldPages is a massive database that houses the names, email addresses, and telephone numbers of several million Internet users.
At WorldPages, the snooping party uses your real name as a search string, specifying California as your state. Instantly, he is confronted with several matches that provide name, address, and telephone number. Here, he might run into some trouble, depending on how common your name is. If your name is John Smith, the snooping party will have to do further research. However, assume that your name is not John Smith—that your name is common, but not that common. The snooping party uncovers three addresses, each in a different California city: One is in Atlanta, one is in Athens, and one is in Plains. How does he determine which one is really you? He proceeds to the host utility.
The host utility will list all machines on a given network and their relative locations. With large networks, it is common for a provider to have machines sprinkled at various locations throughout a state. The host command can identify which workstations are located where. In other words, it is generally trivial to obtain a listing of workstations by city. These workstations are sometimes even named for the cities in which they are deposited. Therefore, you might see an entry such as the following:
chatsworth1.target_provider.com
Chatsworth is a city in northwest Georgia. From this entry, we can assume that chatsworth1.target_provider.com is located within the city of Chatsworth. What remains for the snooper is to re-examine your Usenet post.
By examining the source code of your Usenet post, he can view the path the message took. That path will look something like this:
news2.cais.com!in1.nntp.cais.net!feed1.news.erols.com!howland.erols.net! ix.netcom.com!news
By examining this path, the snooping party can now determine which server was used to post the article. This information is then coupled with the value for the NNTP posting host:
grc-ny4-20.ix.netcom.com
The snooping party extracts the name of the posting server (the first entry along the path). This is almost always expressed in its name state and not by its IP address. For the snooping party to complete the process, the IP address is needed. Therefore, he telnets to the posting host. When the Telnet session is initiated, the hard, numeric IP is retrieved from DNS and printed to STDOUT. The snooping party now has the IP address of the machine that accepted the original posting. This IP address is then run against the outfile obtained by the host query. This operation reveals the city in which the machine resides.
TIP
If this information does not exactly match, the snooping party can employ other methods. One technique is to issue a traceroute request. When tracing the route to a machine that exists in another city, the route must invariably take a path through certain gateways. These are main switching points through which all traffic passes when going in or out of a city. Usually, these are high-level points, operated by telecommunication companies such as MCI, Sprint, and so forth. Most have city names within their addresses. Bloomington and Los Angeles are two well-known points. Thus, even if the reconciliation of the posting machine’s name fails against the host outfile, a traceroute will reveal the approximate location of the machine.
Having obtained this information (and having now differentiated you from the other names), the snooping party returns to WorldPages and chooses your name. Within seconds, a graphical map of your neighborhood appears. The exact location of your home is marked on the map by a circle. The snooping party now knows exactly where you live and how to get there. From this point, he can begin to gather more interesting information about you. For example:
The snooping party can determine your status as a registered voter and your political affiliations. He obtains this information at http://www.wdia.com/lycos/voter-records.htm.
From federal election records online, he can determine which candidates you support and how much you have contributed. He gets this information from http://www.tray.com/cgi-win/indexhtml.exe?MBF=pr_info.
He can also get your Social Security number and date of birth. This information is available at http://kadima.com/.
He might be able to determine the value of your house, what company has your mortgage, and the amount of property tax you have paid every year. Many counties now have their property records available for free over the Web.
Many people minimize the seriousness of this. Their prevailing attitude is that all such information is available through other sources anyway. The problem is that the Internet brings these sources of information together. Integration of such information allows this activity to be conducted on a wholesale basis, and that’s where the trouble begins.
As a side note, complete anonymity on the Internet is possible, but usually not achievable by legal means. Given enough time, for example, authorities could trace a message posted via anonymous remailer. (Although, if that message were chained through several remailers, the task would be far more complex.) The problem is in the design of the Internet itself. As Ralf Hauser and Gene Tsudik note in their article, “On Shopping Incognito:”
From the outset, the nature of current network protocols and applications runs counter to privacy. The vast majority have one thing in common: They faithfully communicate end-point identification information. “End-point” in this context can denote a user (with a unique ID), a network address, or an organization name. For example, electronic mail routinely communicates sender’s [sic] address in the header. File transfer (for example, FTP), remote login (for example, Telnet), and hypertext browsers (for example, WWW) expose addresses, host names, and IDs of their users.
Then there is the question of whether users are entitled to anonymity. I believe they are. Certainly, there are plenty of legitimate reasons for allowing anonymity on the Internet. The following is excerpted from Anonymity for Fun and Deception: The Other Side of “Community” by Richard Seltzer:
Some communities require anonymity for them to be effective, because without it members would not participate. This the case with Alcoholics Anonymous, AIDS support groups, drug addiction support, and other mutual help organizations, particularly when there is some risk of social ostracism or even legal consequences should the identity of the members be revealed.
This is a recurring theme in the now-heated battle over Internet anonymity. Even many members of the “establishment” recognize that anonymity is an important element that might preserve free speech on the Internet—not just here, but abroad. This issue has received increased attention in legal circles. A. Michael Froomkin, a lawyer and prominent professor, wrote an excellent paper on the subject. In “Anonymity and Its Enmities,” Froomkin writes
Persons who wish to criticize a repressive government or foment a revolution against it may find remailers invaluable. Indeed, given the ability to broadcast messages widely using the Internet, anonymous email may become the modern replacement of the anonymous handbill. Other examples include corporate whistle-blowers, people criticizing a religious cult or other movement from which they might fear retaliation, and persons posting requests for information to a public bulletin board about matters too personal to discuss if there were any chance that the message might be traced back to its origin.
TIP
“Anonymity and Its Enmities” by Professor Froomkin is an excellent source for links to legal analysis of Internet anonymity. The paper is an incredible resource, especially for journalists. It can be found on the Web at http://www.wm.edu/law/publications/jol/95_96/froomkin.html.
However, not everyone feels that anonymity is a good thing. Some people believe that if anonymity is available on the Internet, it amounts to nothing but anarchy. A rather ironic quote, considering the source, is found in Computer Anarchy: A Plea for Internet Laws to Protect the Innocent, by Martha Seigel:
People need safety and order in cyberspace just as they do in their homes and on the streets. The current state of the Internet makes it abundantly clear that general anarchy isn’t working. If recognized governments don’t find a way to bring order to the growing and changing Internet, chaos may soon dictate that the party is over.
You might or might not know why this quote is so incredibly ironic. The author, Martha Seigel, is no stranger to “computer anarchy.” In her time, she has been placed on the Internet Blacklist of Advertisers for violating network policies against spamming the Usenet news network. The Internet Blacklist of Advertisers, now defunct, was intended to curb inappropriate advertising on Usenet newsgroups and via junk email. It worked by describing offenders and their offensive behavior, expecting that people who read it will punish the offenders in one way or another. The following is quoted from the docket listing on that Blacklist in regards to Cantor & Seigel, Ms. Seigel’s law firm:
The famous greencard lawyers. In 1994, they repeatedly sent out a message offering their services in helping to enter the U.S. greencard lottery to almost all Usenet newsgroups. (Note in passing: They charged $100 for their service, while participating in the greencard lottery is free and consists merely of sending a letter with your personal information at the right time to the right place.) When the incoming mail bombs forced their access provider to terminate their account, they threatened to sue him until he finally agreed to forward all responses to them.
However, all this is academic. As we move toward a cashless society, anonymity might be built in to the process. In this respect, at least, list brokers (and other unsavory information collectors) had better do all their collecting now. Analysis of consumer-buying habits will likely become a thing of the past, at least with relation to the Internet. The majority of electronic payment services being developed (or already available) on the Internet include anonymity as an inherent part of their design.
TIP
Several digital electronic payment systems exist today. A lot of research has been done in this area. A couple of companies with currently deployed systems are
PayPal (http://www.paypal.com), which is now owned by eBay.
VeriSign Payment Processing (http://www.verisign.com/products/payment.html), formerly CyberCash.
What I have a hard time understanding is how these systems can provide anonymous transactions. The reason I bring this up is simply that records must be maintained, log files generated, transactions authorized, and people involved to ensure the system works. Therefore, these “anonymous” transactions really aren’t—and that brings you to my warning.
When you are at work, you need to assume that you have no privacy at all. Companies search email messages for employees who are looking for another job, giving out company secrets, and the like. It is also likely that your email messages have been recorded to a backup tape somewhere and could be around for years. Even Bill Gates has suffered from this problem when the government got a hold of these email messages via court order and presented them in court proceedings.
However, it does not stop at just email. Companies often monitor Web browsing in the same way. If you go to Web sites that are not work-related, you could be fired.
To make matters worse, some even go an extra step. If you view your Hotmail or Yahoo! Mail accounts from work, they can capture your email messages to monitor you even more.
If you don’t like this, what can you do? To be honest, the best options are either to find a position at a less paranoid company or just never do any nonwork-related Internet use from the office. If neither of these are an option, the best I can suggest is to use one of the anonymous surfing services given at the end of the chapter, which enable you to use SSL to encrypt your traffic. Unfortunately, there are no guarantees even in that case.
Technology is rapidly changing our society, and personal privacy is disappearing in the process. The Internet will only further facilitate that process.
Already, many banks are using biometrics for customer identification. The process is bone chilling. To withdraw your money, you must surrender your retina or thumbprint to a scanner that authenticates you. This technology is already being marketed for personal computers, and the sales pitch sounds enticing. After all, aren’t you tired of having to enter a password every time you boot your machine or log on to the Net?
Soon, biometric authentication will be used in online electronic commerce. Before you close this book, I ask you to consider this very carefully: Imagine the climate a decade from now. Each user will have a unique, digital ID based on a cryptographic value. That value will be a 32-bit or 64-bit number derived from the physical characteristics of your face or your right hand. Without that number, you will not be able to buy or sell anything. When that time comes, remember that you read it here first.