“I was Running Opera on a nephew’s system, specifically ver 7.03 US – the adware version. I didn’t mind ignoring the ads too much, and even occasionally clicked on a few to feed the clikthru hungry bannerati. Lo and behold, without entering any voluntary location data, and always entering such info in a dodgy fashion when it was a “required field”, the banner ads started getting personal, or at least – local, advertising businesses very close by. It seemed as if the browser might be feeding back URL lists, or perhaps, gasp, form field content, or XML. Naw… I thought – not Opera. I like those folks, and have recommended it to so many.” Read the article at The Inquirer.
Opera is Spyware? Dodgy Goings on Backstage
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Now admittedly I don’t like the idea of it sending information back for tailored ads, but I think this guy is jumping to conclusions. The fact that it loads a DLL does not necessarily make it evil or unethical. I would wait for a response from Opera before I jumped to the conclusio n that they were evil, insecure, unethical, and worthy of bashing.
resolve your ip adress… .at –> austria, .de –> germany, .it –> italy, .se –>sweden, .cz –> czech republic, etc… very easy…
Uhhhh, he provided absolutely no proof that anything bad was going on. Yes it’s odd behavior, but to go and make such accusations without properly identifying what is happening behind the scenes is absurd. Do your homework and do a network trace and figure out what its doing rather than jumping to conclusions based on little evidence.
I do hope Opera gets back over this.. I’ve also noticed the growing RAM footprint when running Opera 7.03 on my 32Mb Laptop.
I like targeted ads. I hate seeing ads for Microsoft software I will never buy.
I noticed on OS X that Opera 6 – latest version for the platform will not browse local files although it does on windows.
Although I have nothing to hide, I don’t want it reading my emails. I don’t use it any more for email anyway as I have moved to the more fully features Mail.app that comes with OS X.
http://www.maxmind.com (among others) provides a service that can determine the user’s physical location (down to the city) from his/her IP address.
http://www.opera.com/docs/ads/
Just another funny Inquirer story
First, let’s get Opera’s side of the story:
http://www.opera.com/support/search/supsearch.dml?index=453
“When Opera connects to the ad servers to download new ads, no information which can identify a person is sent, and everything can be viewed as pure text. There are no attempts to hide the transmitted data.”
I found it incredibly odd that for all the monitoring software this guy downloaded, he never downloaded a packet sniffer.
Run a packet sniffer in the background and what do you see? Opera periodically connecting to the ad servers and making plaintext HTTP requests. The information that’s set is everything you’ve filled out in the “Personal Information” section of the configuration.
But then during a now seemingly routine DLL load notification, I read that Opera had loaded a pgpmn.dll file, that I couldn’t explain. After all, I wasn’t using pgp on this machine, and my nephew hadn’t fired it up in weeks, or longer, so I had to wonder – What was Opera doing with my pgp files, without my express permission to be there?
I downloaded the Process Viewer utility linked to in the article. At no point in time was “pgpmn.dll” loaded. Furthermore, I have no “pgpmn.dll” on my system.
Here’s a quick listing of all DLLs that come with Opera 7.10:
C:Program FilesOpera>dir /s *.dll
Volume in drive C has no label.
Volume Serial Number is C070-1B26
Directory of C:Program FilesOpera
04/10/2003 05:21 PM 167,936 es262-32.dll
04/10/2003 05:21 PM 198,656 m2.dll
04/10/2003 05:21 PM 53,248 Opjpeg32.dll
04/10/2003 05:21 PM 65,024 Oppng32.dll
04/10/2003 05:21 PM 46,592 OUniAnsi.dll
04/10/2003 05:21 PM 31,744 vxpi.dll
04/10/2003 05:21 PM 47,616 xmlparse.dll
04/10/2003 05:21 PM 39,424 zip.dll
8 File(s) 650,240 bytes
Directory of C:Program FilesOperaPlugins
03/04/2003 09:09 PM 98,304 npqtplugin.dll
03/04/2003 09:09 PM 98,304 npqtplugin2.dll
03/04/2003 09:09 PM 98,304 npqtplugin3.dll
3 File(s) 294,912 bytes
Directory of C:Program FilesOperaProgramPlugins
02/11/2003 07:02 AM 32,768 np32dsw.dll
09/18/2002 03:31 AM 4,608 NPAdbESD.dll
11/01/2002 09:15 PM 86,125 NPJava11.dll
11/01/2002 09:15 PM 86,125 NPJava12.dll
11/01/2002 09:15 PM 86,125 NPJava13.dll
11/01/2002 09:15 PM 86,125 NPJava32.dll
11/01/2002 09:15 PM 86,122 NPJPI140_03.dll
08/12/2002 12:42 AM 103,344 nppdf32.dll
03/04/2003 02:06 PM 109,056 nppl3260.dll
03/05/2003 12:51 PM 729,088 NPSWF32.dll
12/20/1999 02:16 PM 8,704 npwmsdrm.dll
11/19/2002 04:01 PM 28,672 PlugDef.dll
12 File(s) 1,446,862 bytes
The Process viewer also showed me the 8 threads it was running, and strangely, though MS Task Manager showed Opera operating at normal priority, the child threads showed a different story. No less than two threads were running at Time-Critical priority, and another thread was “above normal”.
As far as I can tell, it’s not possible for the Windows Task Manager to display priority…
I downloaded the “Process Viewer” utility. Virtually every application had at least one thread running at higher than normal priority. My copy of Opera had three threads running, one of which was running at a higher-than-normal priority (10). Opening notepad.exe and viewing it in Process Viewer showed one thread, also running at priority 10. Clearly this isn’t something out of the ordinary.
As far as I’m concerned, they have a near-impossible chance of winning back any trust from me, and despite the many features of Opera that I truly enjoyed, like mouse gestures and easy page ZOOM, I’m going to flip over to Phoenix. I’ve been playing with it, and thought it wasn’t quite ready, but I now think that it is ready enough, based on the alternatives. (Phoenix and Mozilla also have the best support I’ve seen for Math-ML, do render complex mathematical formulae almost as well as TeX.) Phoenix is FAST, has a tiny memory footprint, and it is open source.
Yes, nothing like filling your head with paranoid delusions then pushing another browser.
I don’t know about you, but I believe this article is total bullshit.
>Uhhhh, he provided absolutely no proof that anything bad was going on.
Time-Critical child threads are reason enough to ditch any program. That’s system instability waiting to happen.
At first glance I thought “Oh no! Not norway!”, but after reading the very dubious “article” I feel no different about Opera.
“Today I’ve learned to spell betrayal – O.P.E.R.A.”
It’s just no good bleh writing back to back, and it’s on The inquirer too so I’d take it with a truckload of salt either way. If I were Eug i’d remove the comment above on how to remove banners in Opera (of all places a “tip” like that doesn’t belong here IMHO), how do you thinl Eug would like it if we all were to block all banners from this site?
Have you ever heard of “whois”? It’s a wonderful tool. You can use it to identify the owner of an IP block, and from there you can usually find the country, sometimes even the city.
People often use it to send those letters they always threaten, the “I’m going to write your ISP and tell them you like to see nude doggies!” emails.
Most Opera ads are not intrusive, and a few complaints to their ad department are usually enough to stop those stupid “Your computer is broadcasting an IP adress” that managed to slip through.
Ehhhhhh – Don’t give any crap to Eugenia for modding down my comment. Even I can understand it.
You don’t need to set up a proxy to block the addresses. Windows has a hosts file, you can add entries to the hosts (“c:windowssystem32driversetchosts”) file. You can download a modified hosts file from the “supertrick” page on the kazaa lite website.
it is a waste of money, and not a very good web browser anyway…
get mozilla http://www.mozilla.org/
it is a waste of money, and not a very good web browser anyway…
Opera…
the browser that invented the concept of “tabbed browsing”?
the browser that is more standards compliant than Mozilla?
perhaps the only web browser that is still innovative?
with lower startup times and faster page rendering speeds than Mozilla?
I’m curious how you define a “good web browser” in your mind… oh wait, I know, because it’s open source, that makes it good.
You make about as much sense as the author of the article…
And quit trolling
I’ll add myself to the list of people who don’t believe that Opera would do anything underhanded or that contravenes their stated policies.
Contrast that to MS. When an article comes out that says
they are phoning home or putting UID on every word doc
made it turns out to be true and often in violation of their stated policies.
I find this incident illustrates what trustworthiness really is -something that is earned not announces.
Opera has it. Ms never will.
get phoenix it’s better than IE and Opera. I hate opera browser (5 years to implement to customizable toolbar?, i know u could have done it by editin ini file).
get phoenix and install mouse gesture, tab extensions they are awesome so much configurability, it blows oepra away.
Opera Sux. only thing it has is “dedicated support” fans and that it was fast and small “5 years back”.
it blows.
get phoenix it’s better than IE and Opera.
How so? Is it faster than Opera? More standards compliant? Does it have a smaller memory footprint?
I hate opera browser (5 years to implement to customizable toolbar?
Or you can simply turn the toolbar off, because it’s rendered obselete by gestures…
get phoenix and install mouse gesture, tab extensions they are awesome so much configurability, it blows oepra away.
So basically I need a bunch of extensions to accomplish what is core functionality in Opera…
And it still won’t be as standards compliant… or fast
Opera Sux.
Yes, aren’t we the intelligent little child, spelling at a first grade level…
Only thing it has is “dedicated support” fans and that it was fast and small “5 years back”.
And this makes Phoenix good how? Because it’s faster and smaller? Oh wait, it’s neither…
it blows.
No, it doesn’t, but that troll certainly did…
I know another guy mentioned that a company that sells software to resolve a persons location from their ip, but check this website. It’s pretty amazing. It found my location exactly, which isn’t usually the case for me since Cox is based out of the south. This site will even tell you international locations, including the city too. I’m sure Opera’s ad system could find your location through your ip to send targetted adverts. This article is bogus.
http://www.geobytes.com/IpLocator.htm
Opera Sux. only thing it has is “dedicated support” fans and that it was fast and small “5 years back”
Take a look at the download size, and compare the functionality in that small package to the mess of files and crap you get with Phoenix, then tell me it was only fast and small 5 years back.
Next, try opening some web pages, and some more, in fact open 20 tabs….do the same in phoenix and compare. Phoenix will chug, opera will run happily.
LaTech.edu says it all really.
The Inquirer, like all British Tabloid Press, does what it can to make a mountain out of a mole-hill. If the author of the article really had a problem with using Opera due to the possibility of spyware being in the application, then why does the author insist upon using Windows?
Opera may be more standards compliant, may load faster, may load web pages faster… but fuck ads and fuck paying for a web browser. Phoenix and Mozilla are as free as free can be, and they are more than sufficient for all the web surfing anybody will do. There is no good reason to pay for a browser or to put up with annoying ads when there are free alternatives.
You would of thought that if he wanted to know what information opera was sending to the ad servers he would of looked at the packets on the wire not the dll’s it’s loaded.
My money is on him either being a fool or on a mission to cause distrust amoung Opera users.
There is no good reason to pay for a browser or to put up with annoying ads when there are free alternatives.
As the saying goes… you get what you pay for.
> As far as I can tell, it’s not possible for the Windows
> Task Manager to display priority…
Well, you should dig little deeper into menus and options then. I’m watching priorities on my w2k taskmanager as we speak.
Well, you should dig little deeper into menus and options then. I’m watching priorities on my w2k taskmanager as we speak.
Yes, I see the “base priority” option now…
So am I to believe that something is better because it is open source? Ever see the movie Tommy Boy? Remember the line about taking a crap in a box and putting a warranty on it?
“the browser that invented the concept of ‘tabbed browsing’?”
While I like Opera as much as the next guy (I’ve paid for every version since 3.x), Opera actually didn’t invent the concept of “tabbed browsing.” NetCaptor, a pay-for shell for Internet Explorer (http://www.netcaptor.com/), invented “tabbed browsing,” and Opera “borrowed” the idea from it, and Mozilla “borrowed” the idea from Opera.
Jack
//it is a waste of money, and not a very good web browser anyway… //
Uh … Opera is free …
sheesh.
“with lower startup times and faster page rendering speeds than Mozilla?”
I could drive over to a webserver, burn the websites entire file collection to a CD in the time it takes Mozilla to startup and render a page ;o)
“While I like Opera as much as the next guy (I’ve paid for every version since 3.x), Opera actually didn’t invent the concept of “tabbed browsing.” NetCaptor, a pay-for shell for Internet Explorer (http://www.netcaptor.com/), invented “tabbed browsing,” and Opera “borrowed” the idea from it, and Mozilla “borrowed” the idea from Opera.”
According to the netcaptor site the company was founded in 1999. Unless Netcaptor predates the company that made it how did they invent tabbed browsing?
“the browser that is more standards compliant than Mozilla?”
FACTS
Opera’s CSS compliance is still worse than Mozilla’s
Opera’s HTML compliance is still worse than Mozilla’s strict mode
Opera’s XML implementation is not feature complete
Opera’s DOM implementation is still rudimentary
Opera has no meaningful SVG, MathML, XSL etc. support
We (my place of work) build standards based semantic web client stuff, and it’s tough but possible on Gecko browsers, harder but still possible on IE (and worth it due to the huge installed base), and utterly impossible on Opera, even with their latest version.
Opera’s standards compliance stood out when no-one else was trying. When web designers still thought document.all was a pretty neat idea. Now it’s no more than “adequate”, not because Opera did anything wrong, but because the competition did so much right.
FACTS
Opera’s CSS compliance is still worse than Mozilla’s
Wrong, see http://www.xs4all.nl/~ppk/css2tests/
It’s funny you suggest that Opera’s CSS support is worse when Opera employs Håkon Wium Lie, the inventor of CSS… who claims on his page ( http://people.opera.com/howcome/ ):
“The Opera browser is smaller and faster than browsers from Microsoft and Netscape, and it has better support for standards.”
Please don’t go labelling something as “fact” without some sort of supporting documentation.
I have nothing specific to refute the others, except heresay and conjecture.
However, it’s clear from your first statement you are not up to speed on where Opera is at the present time.
The original author seems paranoid that the ads get ‘local’ and ‘personal’. But think about it if the ads aren’t personal what are they good for? Is it ‘I don’t mind watching ads as long as they don’t show things that I might be interested in buying.’ Ads need to target their audiences, and the filtering is mostly done by computers anyway. If you have to watch it anyway (in Opera) why not let it tailor the ads to your needs?
…until the inquirer finds this little guy:
http://www.danasoft.com/vipersig.jpg
hey thats really cool.
Nice Troll.
Use Phoenix. It boots up as quickly as opera, and doesn’t does’t end up digesting 100MB+ of ram (~14MB on my system, not bad considering WinAmp 2.x is 9MB), which opera does with ease.
Use Phoenix. It boots up as quickly as opera, and doesn’t does’t end up digesting 100MB+ of ram (~14MB on my system, not bad considering WinAmp 2.x is 9MB), which opera does with ease.
With 4 open child windows, Opera is using 20MB of RAM on my system…
“It’s funny you suggest that Opera’s CSS support is worse when Opera employs Håkon Wium Lie, the inventor of CSS…”
Is it? Yes they do. I met Howcome at WWW9, a long with a bunch of lying Microsoft engineers (I didn’t know they were lying until IE 5.5 shipped some time later) and many other people eager to serve their corporate masters.
Employing Håkon Wium Lie doesn’t make your parser work better, or your box model implementation more complete, it’s just an exercise in name dropping.
There were also representatives from the W3C at WWW9 (of course) who were not corporate affiliated. Their opinion of Opera was much more critical. Howcome shouted down their criticism, because he felt that since Opera’s record on standards compliance was better than NS 4.x and Internet Explorer, it didn’t matter that the record was still miserable. I begged to differ, and I still do.
The page you linked is by no means comprehensive, and worse it doesn’t distinguish between compliance with a de jure or de facto standard (which is good) and compliance with the author’s wishes (which is worthless).
Examples: Mozilla loses 2 half points for using its private namespace for unfinished CSS3 extensions, instead of polluting the public namespace like Opera. Huh?
Meanwhile Opera gets 3.5/4 for overflow handling, even though overflow: visible simply does not work in Opera 7 (same effect as NS4.x or iCab)
It also doesn’t distinguish clearly between Mozilla 0.6 (!) aka Netscape 6 and Mozilla 1.3.
Interestingly the DOM tables on the same site are at once more comprehensive and complete, and resoundingly agree with my fourth bullet point, but perhaps you didn’t see that?
<<It’s funny you suggest that Opera’s CSS support is worse when Opera employs Håkon Wium Lie, the inventor of CSS.>>
CSS was developed by the W3C, not by a single person.
While I have found PPK-s DOM tables very useful I agree that CSS comparison is somewhat lopsided and using arbitrary features. Font/text-related properties are missing completely, background-attachement and background-repeat are present but not background-color/image/position. Huh?
And no, employing expert doesn’t make product automatically good. Software products are always compromises between ideal, possible and feasible. Everything may not be possible to implement and all that is possible may not be feasible to implement due to the time/funding/whatever constraints. We develop software in-house and no, superior knowledge doesn’t neccessarily wield equally superior product.
Not to bash Opera here, just to say that it’s not superior browser.
“The page you linked is by no means comprehensive, and worse it doesn’t distinguish between compliance with a de jure or de facto standard (which is good) and compliance with the author’s wishes (which is worthless).”
And the page you linked to is… oh wait.
I’ve presented a resource which claims that Opera’s CSS support is better than Mozilla’s. You’ve presented heresay and conjecture.
If you could provide something definitive, you’d do a great deal more towards making your point.
“Employing Håkon Wium Lie doesn’t make your parser work better, or your box model implementation more complete, it’s just an exercise in name dropping.”
So please tell me specifically what is wrong with Opera’s implementation, then tell me what, if anything, is wrong with Mozilla’s implementation.
“Interestingly the DOM tables on the same site are at once more comprehensive and complete, and resoundingly agree with my fourth bullet point, but perhaps you didn’t see that?”
If you’re referring to http://www.xs4all.nl/~ppk/js/w3c_core.html it shoes both Opera and Mozilla implement features that the other browser does not. There’s been no attempt at scoring the overall DOM support. However, I’d say from those tables that your statement:
“Opera’s DOM implementation is still rudimentary”
was not exactly in touch with reality…
“CSS was developed by the W3C, not by a single person”
Yes, thank you for nitpicking…
anyone else noticed that the inquirer just retracted EVERYTHING…? go look on their homepage. also, an opera senior developer posted a decent statement in the following thread http://my.opera.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=17384 rebutting, well, everything.
the end result of it all is that the inquirer guy had absolutely no idea what he was doing, and a lot of wholly unsubstantiated and rather inept crap without apparently understanding anything he was talking about…
Opera’s RAM usage can easily be controlled by its cache settings.
I just a little experiment after reading the developers reply over at the Opera forum.
He mentioned something about an automatic ram cache setting in 7.10, saying that it will allocate 10% of available RAM for Opera’s usage.
Prior to adjusting any settings my system RAM usage was right at 71%. I went into Opera’s cache and RAM settings and changed the memory cache setting from “automatic” to 4 megabytes and system RAM usage dropped to a nice, comfortable 61%.
Opera has always been good to me, every since the 5.0+ days, I see no reason to switch to another browser. Yes, I’ve tried Phoenix and I must say at this stage in its development I’m not impressed with it.
Grusic
It’s funny to see so many people complaining about open-source “trolls” when it is extremely relevant regarding this article. If the product were open source, he would be able to see what it was doing. Since it is not, he needs to wonder what’s going on (or go through the trouble of packet sniffing and hope the data is not encypted).
This is an interesting argument, and one that needs to play out in the software community.
On the one hand, you can theoretically see exactly what is happening in a piece of software if you have the source, making it a great option for security.
On the other hand, you don’t have access to the design documents for your car, let alone your house or the computer you are using in front of you. Why do we believe them to be trustworthy? Because we have ways of testing these things from the outside.
Packet sniffing is one such way. You don’t necessarily need to know how something is working on the inside if you know how it communicates with the outside world. Reputation is another: if a company has been around for many years and has earned high marks from users it is more likely to guard that reputation than a newcomer or a older corporation that has a bad reputation.
Furthermore, OSS does not necessarily mean a particular person will be able to see what it is doing, especially not this guy. What Open Source Software allows, is that many more people in the wild will have access to the design of what each section is doing. However, the overall package of 30 million lines of code in Mozilla would be prohibitively difficult to pick through for backdoors for an outside reporter or auditor. What does that mean? That means we rely upon trusted sources to inform us that the source code isn’t sending our PGP keyring back to mozilla.org… a feat that would be much easier if packets were intercepted and viewed.
Open source is not a panacea… 30 million lines of spaghetti code are just as inaccessable to the layman as 3MB of executable hex. There have been Open Source backdoors in the past
http://www.networkmagazine.com/article/NMG20020826S0005
http://www.minority-report.co.uk/020702.html
http://polywog.navpoint.com/philosophy/ethics/oss_altruism/node19.h…
that have slipped by unnoticed. I’m not saying OSS is useless, but that it is just one piece in a security network… a piece that may or may not be necessary depending upon the conditions of your network.
-C
Next, try opening some web pages, and some more, in fact open 20 tabs….do the same in phoenix and compare. Phoenix will chug, opera will run happily.
I just went to Refdesk [http://refdesk.com/] in phoenix (If you’re too lazy to go there, it has hundreds of links). I opened all the links in new tabs. All the tabs, were open in just over a second, although it took a lot longer to download them (I’m on 56k dailup…)
I don’t know what sort of computer you’re using, but something must be different. I’m running an Pentium3 866, with 192MB of RAM, Mandrake 9.1, with KDE 3.1. It’s not the best of computers, but it still handled it fine. I tried a similar experiment on a Celeron 400, win98 (I think it had 64MB of RAM), it was a little slower, but by no means was it “chugging”
Don’t get me wrong, I respect your decision. Opera could well be my browser of choice if I could find some money to pay. (I don’t deny it has an amazing feature set). I just don’t want people thinking Firebird (Previously known as Phoenix) is slow, when it is not.
So basically I need a bunch of extensions to accomplish what is core functionality in Opera…
The basic idea behind phoenix is that it would be small, unbloated, and usable for the masses. What they have done is quite clever. They keep the download size small, with a basic feature set. The more personalized (Or advanced, if you will) features can be downloaded very easily. By doing this you avoid the need for downloading and installing a feature that is useless to you, while not making it impossible for others to get such a feature, others who will find it incredibly useful. Quite clever really.
I can’t comment on whether there’s any spyware in Opera as I haven’t bothered to check. But at the moment I’ve been running Opera 7.1 for nearly 3 days and have over 50 windows open, memory usage is at just over 60Mb.
Personally I think that’s acceptable considering the number of windows open, it certainly doesn’t seem like there are any serious memory leaks.
There are still some annoying bugs in Opera 7.1 that IMO should have been fixed before it came out of beta testing. But it’s still vastly superior to any open source browser I’ve tried. AFAIK even with all it’s extensions Phoenix still lacks many nice Opera features, for me a browser that can’t save window sessions is almost unusable. While Phoenix may be quite small and fast, it doesn’t seem to cope well with large numbers of open windows, I’ve had it get unresponsive and crash with more than 30-40 windows open.
Overall Opera is easily the best browser I’ve used.
mmm…anyone can give me the zip.dll file (Opera 5.12 but I believe other version also possible) I accidentally delete it. thanx