Drew (or anyone else who knows),

When I am on the Orchard, and generally after I post to a thread or start one, I see my computer communicating with denness.net. This after the post registers complete and shows up. My computer shows it's busy by the little hourglass and because denness.net shows up in the bottom bar of my browser (foxfire, FTR). Do you know why this is happening? Is that site somehow connected to this site? Thanks in advance.

belly

This is caused by those of us that have this picture in our sig that shows what we are listening to at the moment. It take's the data from audioscrobbler.com and the picture-generating script is hosted by denness.net (for free).

Patrik

Thank you Patrick. Do you know if there is any danger in this? I mean, normally, I would be very unhappy to learn that a service/website I didn't subscribe to is somehow communicating with my computer, but I don't know enough about how these things work.

I'm not sure what you mean. The only communicating your computer is doing is the normal downloading of a png-picture. Happens everytime you load a web page. The only reason you can even see it is because that server (denness.net) is slightly overloaded and ths a bit slow.

My computer sends information to audioscrobbler because i told it to do so. This could be a bad thing if I could not trust the program that does it, but it is very simple and even I can tell that it does what it is supposed to do (only).

diggin' on some radiohead, huh patrik?

Well yeah... But these days radiohead only make up to about a sixth of my music database, it used to be a fourth.

Patrik

Anna, it's no different than your computer connecting to any other webpage, it's just that when a site is running slowly, you actually notice it loading in your browser.