Has anyone else noticed the volume of scripts running on almost every web page we visit these days? Almost all of them are from third parties, concerned with monitoring, recording and storing your personal IP address and all of your activities, such as every page you look at and every link you click, possibly even connecting you, personally, to each and every word on each and every web page you ever visit.
All of that information has to be transmitted and stored someplace for someone to use, else they wouldn’t be collecting it in the first place, would they? Think about it for a second. If spam is utterly wasting huge amounts of bandwidth and slowing the ‘Net for everyone, what are these scripts doing to our bandwidth? It’s my guess they’re wasting (from our point of view) a hell of a lot more bandwidth than spam.
Page Hangs
I’ve noticed quite often when a web page refuses to fully load and just hangs there forever, there’s nothing wrong with the web page I’m visiting. The problem is more often than not with some script that somehow got stuck, loading from some remote web server, which belongs to some marketing research company I’ve never heard of and I don’t really want monitoring me at all, let alone slowing me down or stopping my surfing.
Mea Culpa
Even this blog page, provided gratis by WordPress, sometimes loads endlessly when I try to access it.
Of course, as on almost all web pages, there’s the google-analytics script running on my WordPress blog page. It’s not my idea. I guess WordPress and/or Google wants it running for some unexplained reason. Perhaps they sell the information to advertisers? I don’t know because they didn’t ask me.
There’s also a script from Quantcast, another company that runs scripts on many of the web pages I visit. They appear to be collecting information for advertisers. That’s not my idea either but once again, no-one asked me. Quite often when my blog page loads endlessly but never finishes, I’ve noticed it’s waiting for something called pixel.quantserve.com. I guess, when the Quantcast server is busy and slow, so is my blog.
A script from something called Snap loads. I’m unclear as to why a product called Snap needs to run scripts in someone else’s computer memory every time they load my bog but I guess it’s another WordPress thing. It may be very useful but I don’t know what it is or what it does, so I don’t really know if I want it running or not. In any case, no-one asked me.
Finally, there’s a script called WordPress Stats, which seems fairly self-explanatory. I kind of like that one because it lets me know how many people visit this blog and what they’re interested in viewing when they visit. Of course, it’s possible it might collect a lot more information than that but I never see it.
Disclaimer
I have no financial or any other interest in any of the software I mention on this blog. If I did so, I’d say so.
Monitoring the Monitors
If you’re interesting in freaking yourself out one of these days (and who isn’t?) there’s a Firefox add-on called Ghostery and it allows you to see what companies are running what scripts on what web pages. It doesn’t do anything else, it just pops up a list of the people who are spying on you. If you install it in your Firefox browser, you may be in for a bit of a surprise.
Since I’m curious, I’ve got my Ghostery set to pop up the list of scripts on each web page I visit for just a few seconds. These days, it never stops popping up lists. Some web pages, like my WordPress blog, have only three or four scripts running. Other pages have a dozen or more scripts running. If you ever wondered why a relatively simple looking web page takes forever to load, it’s certainly possible it might be all those scripts trying to install on your machine — from a whole slew of machines you’re not even visiting! How cool is that?
Most people don’t realize it but the scripts don’t run on the web page they’re visiting, the scripts run on your computer and if you use a Microsoft product, they run on your computer in Administrator mode, which is the default mode for most Windows computers surfing the ‘Net. Of course, that’s also how you get virii, trojans, rootkits, spyware and other malware installed on your machine without your knowledge.
Blocking Scripts
As an aside, to block all of these intrusive scripts and as a byproduct, speed up your surfing enormously, there’s another add-on for Firefox called NoScript. It also shows you the scripts on the web pages you visit and it allows you to block scripts you choose to block and run scripts you choose to run — and you really do want lots of these scripts to run on lots of web pages. For instance, some web pages are nothing but a script and for other web pages, you need to allow scripts to run if you want to see videos or animation etcetera.
Warning!
Frankly, as much as I like it and depend upon it, NoScript is a major pain in the ass and you definitely need to know what you’re doing to use it properly but I wouldn’t surf without it. For instance, I block all the scripts running on my own blog. I block google-analytics everywhere and a host of other commonly encountered snooping scripts everywhere. I have to block or allow new scripts each and every day and that’s the pain in the ass. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if you want a script running or not – or which scripts you want running and which ones you want to block.
Amazingly enough, I can still surf the web just fine without allowing most scripts to run on my computer. Imagine that!
Please don’t install NoScript, then come back and complain you can’t do certain things on certain web pages. I’ve already told you, it can be a real pain in the ass.
Making Money? Bandwidth Hogging is Suddenly Not a Problem
It seems we have to learn to live with these intrusive scripts, following us around everywhere in combination with tracking Cookies and routing our private, personal information back to a seemingly endless number of marketing research companies. We have no power and no say in the matter but the next time you read about ISPs throttling people’s bandwidth because the people are doing something bandwidth-intensive, like perfectly legal torrents, keep in mind these very same ISPs don’t seem to be even slightly troubled by the proliferation of off-site scripts, wasting lots of bandwidth, twenty four hours a day.
It seems in the world today, if you make lots of money at something, it’s automatically ethical, acceptable and legal. That’s called corporate thinking and somehow our elected representatives have also enthusiastically adopted that thought process. It’s the kind of thinking that led directly to the financial meltdown, through which all of us are now suffering.
The next time some web page starts loading and never stops or the next time your surfing seems more than a little bit slower than the speed you’re purchasing from your ISP, keep in mind it’s those nice people who are trying to sell you things, things you neither want nor need, who are causing a lot of your grief.
Be sure to buy something from them, right?
