| | | "People who make no noise are dangerous.", La Fontaine |
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WebNowseBETA does unsupervised Internet browsing using Internet Explorer. Unlike normal browsing which is triggered explicitly by a human user, WebNowse generates automatic noise in the Internet. Hence, the term nowsing (from noise), instead of browsing. Nowsing makes it harder for an external third-party to figure out what a human user really browses.
download | usage
WebNowseBETA - me nowse, you browse ...
Here you can download the latest version of WebNowse free for personal use. WebNowse is still in beta status, and has a list of several known issues. Before using WebNowse read fully this page and the on-line help.
| Version | Type | File | Size | Comment |
|---|
| 1.0.0 | binary | | ~225KB | Compiled with .NET 1.0 |
PAD file: http://madebits.com/webnowse/pad.xml
WebNowse is an autonomous personal user web agent. It works independently of the user and tries to simulate a real Internet user as much as possible, while generating noise.
WebNowse starts with a customizable set of generic Internet queries. From this set of queries, WebNowse selects one at random and some random words and does a search. For each processed page, WebNowse collects some of the links it contains, and some of the words. It uses the links to continue browsing and the collected words to do new queries. New queries are done when there are no more links to visit, or the when the pages visited surpass some variable maximum, or when the one-query browsing time is bigger than a given variable threshold.
WebNowse also submits randomly filled web forms, forgets randomly some of the words its learns from the visited pages, and does other actions that simulate what a real user would do.
WebNowse looks like Internet Explorer. It becomes hard for an external third-party, to distinguish between the URLs visited explicitly by the user, and those visited by WebNowse. The amount of data to be processed is bigger and the data mining patters found will be missleading. The users can indirectly influence the patterns via the set of queries they use to initialize WebNowse.
WebNowse generates unnecessary Internet traffic. By default, WebNowse generates no more traffic than a normal human user that browses all the time. WebNowse is suitable for flat-rate broadband users, whose bandwidth is unlimited. Other users may experiment with WebNowse parameters to slow it down, so that it uses no more than their quota of bandwidth.
WebNowse uses the Internet Explorer control. The good thing about this is that WebNowse browsing is indistinguishable from browsing done explicitly using Internet Explorer. The bad thing is that while running WebNowse, the system is vulnerable to Internet Explorer security issues. For best safety, use a latest patched version of the Internet Explorer (and read the WebNowse on-line help for additional hints).
WebNowseBETA is experimental software. The implications that may result from using WebNowse are not fully understood. If this is a problem for you, then do not use WebNowse.
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