Stats - Usenet referrer

[Cindy]

In my stats: ALL REFERS includes a listing:
USENET REFERRERnews://news/372dbc54.7153102@news.globalserve.net

It doesn't include a link. Can anyone tell me what this is and how I can view the source?

Also, in the Code 404 Not Found Requests section I have quite a few listings for "/favicon.ico" - what the heck is this?
Thanks!
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Cindy
[nbsp]www.mjblue.com (http://www.mjblue.com)[nbsp][nbsp]

[This message has been edited by Cindy (edited 05-11-99)]

[Deb]

The favicon is something IE5 did to make our stats larger then they already were :þ[nbsp][nbsp]You will find the answer here http://www.aota.net/ubb/Forum6/HTML/000031.html :)

As far as the news referrer hmmm it probably came from one of the news groups listed on this page http://www.globalserve.net/help/news/

Deb

[Deb]

Additions ....

On the good side ... seeing favicon in your stats means ppl are bookmarking your page ;)

On the bad side... favicon has it's privacy and hack issues http://www.wired.com/news/news/technology/story/19160.html It allows info to go through where it shouldn't... and it does not check to assure the file is not corrupt before downloading it and putting it on your system if you bookmark a page... This can cause a person who simply wants to bookmark, to end up locked up and rebooting if the file is in fact corrupt :(

Deb

[Justin]

Not to argue, but...

I didn't see anything there about corrupt icon files and honestly, an icon is just a bitmap with a different name - an uncompressed image file. You can open a 16 to 256 color icon in Notepad, resize it to 16 or 32 characters accross (depending whether it's a 16 x 16 or a 32 x 32 icon) and see the image sort of - it's kinda cool :)

But other than that there's a header telling it how many colors, etc - nothing at all that can corrupt a system...

The privacy concern is very real though, and it's one I hadn't thought of - sites can easily track users that bookmark a site, for marketing reasons, etc - and that sux :([nbsp][nbsp]And really there's no way around it because you can't turn the "feature" off...

MS at it's best :(
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Justin Nelson
FutureQuest Support