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Phone Service New Zealand |
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Phoning home is usually surreptitious communication between
applications or hardware installed at end-user sites and their
manufacturers or developers. This could be for purposes of
access control, such as transmitting an authorisation key. It
could also be for marketing purposes, such as the "Sony BMG
Rootkit", which transmits a hash of the currently playing CD
back to Sony, or a digital video recorder (DVR) reporting on
viewing habits.
The traffic could be encrypted, so that the end-user does not
know what data is being transmitted.
In one sense, every time a user visits a web page or any other
kind of remote server it is "phoning home" since the IP address
of the user's own computer is sent to the web server (an
unavoidable process if a reply is required). The use of graphics
on a web page establishes further connections, possibly to
different sites, which can also be used for tracking, as in the
case of "web beacons". Some other file types can do the same
kind of (essentially anonymous) tracking by setting up a
connection which is intended to be logged |
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