Real,Life,Internet,Evil,amp,#5 technology Real Life Internet Evil: Microsoft's Smart T

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Our purpose with this series is to use real life examples of deception,fraud and other evil to show how you can better protect yourself. Theexamples cited in these articles are intended to demonstrate best practicesand recommendations.You've worked hard on your web pages. If you are anything like me, you'vespent countless hours writing content, finding or creating graphics, cursingat tables, juggling lists and learning HTML and possibly even CSS, Java,DHTML and countless other things. My web site is uniquely mine. It is a product of my imagination, my sweat,my brain and my frustration. I have spent many sleepless nights andcountless long days adding just the perfect content to communicate exactlywhat I wanted to say.Now Microsoft has come along with a "brilliant" idea. They want to piggybacktheir own selected content on top of that work. The idea is to have theirproducts (such as Internet Explorer and the Office suite) scan web pages anddocuments for keywords and phrases known to the Microsoft. Any of these thatare found would be underlined with a special purple "squiggle" to show thatthey are "smart tags".Anyone viewing the page could then click on the smart tag and be transportedto a Microsoft web site for more information. For example, you could write aweb page about the Grand Canyon, and the phrase "Grand Canyon" could beunderlined, allowing your visitors to check out the Expedia.Com page abouthow to book travel to the area.Why does Microsoft want to do this? It's really very simple - to make anincredible amount of money. Look at it this way, Microsoft suddenly wouldhave at their disposal every single document viewed with a new Microsoftproduct as a potential advertisement. Wow. That's power. No, this is anunderstatement of incredible magnitude. This is more than power - this isthe harnessing of everyone's creative energy into a huge global advertisingtool. It totally staggers the imagination.You could be looking at a newspaper site, reading an article about traintravel, and click on numerous links to Microsoft sites (and presumably thirdparty sites which paid Microsoft for the privilege) selling train relatedproducts and services. If you read a classified ad on that same newspapersite selling an automobile, the word "Cadillac" could be underlined with asmart tag linking to a Cadillac dealer.Content (the tags) are added dynamically to web pages by the browser withoutthe permission of the person who created the pages (the webmaster orauthor). While strictly speaking this might not violate copyright laws (butit might be considered vandalism), it sure is rude. In fact, most peoplewould consider it highly unethical.As an example, suppose you bought a book through a book club. Before it wasshipped to you, someone opened the book and examined every single page,adding comments here and there about how you could purchase this or get moreinformation about that. You would be very annoyed if you were the author,you'd probably be livid if you were the publisher of the book, and you'dalmost certainly return it if you were the customer.Carefully crafted web pages whose look and feel has been lovingly built forcountless hours by dedicated designers, authors, artists and webmasterswould be randomly covered with trash by a company intent on siphoning awayvisitors to their own sites and pages.And what about the problem of inappropriate content? Suppose you had a sitewhich was against animal cruelty, yet Smart Tags went ahead and added toyour pages links to other sites which sold muzzles for horses? You wouldn'tlike that very much, would you?Another problem is that Smart Tags are "opt-out". This means the tags areinserted unless you (the webmaster or the user) indicate that you do notwant them. Opt-Out is the preferred method of removal for many advertisersbecause they understand that most people will not bother to removethemselves from the list. Opt-in is the preferred method of most consumersbecause then they receive only what they have requested.Webmasters can keep smart tags from working on their site by including aspecial "opt-out" metatag in the header of each and every page. I highlyrecommend that all webmasters include this tag to prevent smart tags fromoperating. As soon as Smart Tags appeared in a beta release of Windows XP, the furorbegan. It was awesome to see. Microsoft was hit from all sides by just abouteveryone, because their intentions were so transparent and so blatantlymonopolistic that even the most conservative could see what they were up to.The dangers caused a flood of protests to be received by the giant company,so many that Microsoft was forced to remove the feature from their products."As a result of smart tags in beta versions of Windows XP and IE, wereceived lots of feedback, and have realized that there is a need to betterbalance the user experience with the legitimate concerns of contentproviders and web sites," Microsoft said in a statement on June 28th, 2001.Keep an eye on Microsoft, however, because they also added, "Microsoftremains committed to this type of technology, and will work closely withcontent providers and partners in the industry in the coming months tofurther refine how it can be used." Article Tags: Real Life, Smart Tags