logon puzzle

Videot wrote on 2/10/2005, 5:45 PM
Sometimes when I log on I ususally get to see the option which allows you to edit your preferances & get more than 10 postings on a page. Other times I don't get this option displayed on this page. The page still displays my user name so I'm assuming nothing has changed.

I am slowly moving from using Internet Explorer to Firefox as my browser. Could this be part of the problem? Or could the problem be that sometimes I log on from a laptop rather than my PC?

Comments

nickle wrote on 2/10/2005, 6:15 PM
It's your cookies. Login with Firefox and edit your account and Firefox will save your passwords etc.

Make sure you have allow cookies for the Sony site especially.
JohnnyRoy wrote on 2/10/2005, 6:35 PM
Actually, last week or the week before (I forget which) I could no longer login. I would go to the login page, it would accept my password but then none of my preferences would be set and it still had the login link.

It turns out that I had to enable cookies for the site .in-addr.arpa. (I normally use ZoneAlarm to block all cookies that I don’t specifically allow) I did some research and found out that this domain name is used by Internet web servers that receive connections from IP addresses and wish to obtain domain names to record in log files. I just figured Sony made this change to their web server so I enabled it as a domain to accept cookies from and its been working ever since.

~jr
nickle wrote on 2/10/2005, 8:18 PM
Now I'm confused.

I can see a firewall blocking access to a domain, but since in-addr.arpa isn't a website, why/how is it setting cookies?

As a matter of fact why would a reverse dns lookup even apply to this site?

Why would Sony want to log our ip addresses through reverse dns?

Time to call in the ACLU?

Also I checked my cookie list and don't have one for in-addr.arpa.
JohnnyRoy wrote on 2/10/2005, 8:38 PM
It may not have been the cookie control at all. ZoneAlarm allows you to control mobile code, cookies, web bugs, & private headers. It could have been the private headers for all I know and not the cookies. I just cleared my cache, hit the Sony site, and that was a new domain in my cache. Once I gave it full access I could logon. Maybe it was a fluke? I’ll have to delete it and see if it causes problems again.

~jr
JohnnyRoy wrote on 2/10/2005, 8:42 PM
Well I just deleted it and its seems to still work and it didn’t come back. Never mind. Ghost in the machine I guess.

~jr
nickle wrote on 2/10/2005, 10:24 PM
I'm glad to hear that in-addr.arpa isn't involved.

After Filmy's post about hitbox.com and Sony software and seeing my browser connecting to "ehg-sonycomputer.hitbox.com" everytime I refresh the page or click on anything here and annoying me no end I'm starting to get suspicious.

Pest Patrol says hitbox is spyware and kills it, but this is different.

I still don't like connecting to a spyware site no matter whether it is just counting hits or for other reasons.
Chienworks wrote on 2/11/2005, 3:09 AM
Ah, the advantages and joys of running one's own preferred name servers ...

Long ago i added the following hitbox.com.zone file at work:


So now whenever i browse this site and the browser tries to look up anything at hitbox.com it gets the IP address 127.0.0.2 which is reserved to mean "this site doesn't exist", so the browser doesn't even try to load it. It's amazing how much faster pages at this site load now. I've also got similar records for places like adjuggler.com, advertise.com, cj.zom, doublieclick.com, fastclick.com, gator.com, mediaplex.com, sex.com ... and tons of others. Most are there to block ads and popups so the browser doesn't even try to access them. Others are there to redirect fellow employees away from various ... ummm, how shall i say it? ... non-business related sites.

I believe this can also be done by putting appropriate entries in the C:\windows\hosts file, but it's harder to do because you have to list every single host name instead of just the domain name. The DNS method also works better by controlling our entire network from one spot whereas with the hosts file you must set it up on every PC individually.

I need to set this up at home too.