Today, I got an e-mail from a reader of this blog. She told me that she reads my blog through Bloglines and that every time she clicks on a link, she gets pop-ups for adult entertainment. Very weird, huh? So I went and looked at the feeds (there are like 6 or 7!) available for my blog. Most of them looked totally normal except for one that said next to it “Anonymoused.” There was a URL in front of the feed (http://anonymouse.org/cgi-bin/anon-www.cgi) and that same URL was in front of every link in my blog posts. I decided to look up Anonymouse, and found that it is a way to avoid being tracked when you are surfing the Web. People in China often use things like this so that no one will know what they’ve been looking at on the Web.
I noticed that there are 22 people subscribed to this Anonymoused feed, which is fine if you’re trying to be anonymous online, but if you just accidentally subscribed to this feed, it may not be the one you want (unless you like adult pop-ups — I don’t judge 😉 ). If you see that blog links (example) have a URL in front of them with the word anonymouse in it, you may want to unsubscribe and resubscribe to this feed (http://meredith.wolfwater.com/wordpress/wp-rss2.php since your links may have a weird URL in front of it).
So now I’m not sure what I should do. Should I contact Bloglines and have them delete the feed? Or should I just leave it be in case people need to read this blog or use Bloglines anonymously (as if my blog is so political and controversial!). I also noticed that the LITA Blog has an Anonymoused feed, but no one is currently subscribed to it. Something new every day in the world of RSS!
I am one of those poor souls!!! I never get any cheese! No clue how it happened, and everytime I try to resubscribe I am thrown back into the anonymouse feed. I think they do a good service, but uhm, what the? Could you email me a healthy feed? I’ll unsub and resub, try it that way? Web 2 point voodoo. 🙂
That sounds kind of creepy to me. Could someone have hijacked your feed for their own purposes?
I’d like to spoint out thatanonymouse doesn’t work. If you’ve got a statcounter & someone accesses your blog through anonymouse, it still details all of their information.
just testing to make sure my comments are still working after updating our server software.