Q. What does "browser privacy" do and why do I have to turn it off? Am I exposing my computer to everyone on the internet?

A. No. Here's how the internet works. All webpages are basically made up of text, pictures, and links. We click on a link and that takes us to another page. The page that we go to "sees" the original page as what we call a "referring URL" -- meaning it's the location from which you were referred. Webmasters use this information to see where their site's traffic is coming from -- in fact EHOWA's "Top Ten Referrers" list is compounded directly from that information -- it's a list of whatever ten sites have sent the most referrered urls to EHOWA. So let's take a look at the following example of how this system works...

Let's say you open your browser (Microsoft Explorer) and type in "www.site-one.com" and click "go". From there you spend a few minutes browsing arounf that page and click on a link which brings you to "www.site-two.com". Again, you browse for a few minutes around that site before clicking on another link which brings you to "www.site-three.com".

Now, the webmaster for site-one will see no referring URL for you, since there was none -- you didn't follow any link to his site, you typed it in directly. Make sense? Good. Now, the webmaster for site-two will see the referring URL for your visit as one of the pages from site-one. And likewise, the webmaster running site-three will see your traffic was brought in by a link from site-two. Pretty self-explanatory, right?

So what your firewall's "enable brower privacy" option does, is hide that referring URL information, so it is impossible to tell from where you were referred from. Thus the webmaster for site-one will see no referring URL (no change from before). But the guy running site-two won't see any referring URL either, and will have no idea that you're visiting his site from a link from site-one. And the same thing will happen to the poor bastard running site-three, who will also not know who's sending him traffic.

Realistically, the only way "enable browser privacy" is really useful is if you visit a lot of REALLY weird sites and want to keep that information super-double-dog private. Let's say that you like to stuff gerbils up your ass, and you visit "www.gerbilpumpers.com" and then from there, follow a link to EHOWA. I, as webmaster of EHOWA, will see one person was referred to me by "gerbilhumpers.com". I won't know who they are, or where they live, or how old they are, or what they look like, or if I sit next to them on the bus. I'll only know there is a person somewhere in the world likes both to visit my website and to stuff gerbils in his ass. But that's all I'd know, and even then it's only if I choose to download the 600Mb log file -- with over 60,000,000 lines of text per day -- and examine it line by line. I got three words for you: Not. gonna. happen.

Q. So now I understand what referring URL's are and how they work. But that still doesn't explain why I can't see your pictures.

A. A problem I've been having recently (and many other webmasters too, for that matter) is people leeching pictures off my site. Now by that I don't mean downloading them so they can send out to friends -- you're more than welcome to do that. I mean people who run their websites are linking to pictures directly on my website, thus using my bandwidth. "Bah who cares about a little bit of bandwidth?" you might think. But if you're talking 100 pictures that are 75kb each, each being viewed 1,000 times a day, that's over 7 gigabytes a day or 200 gigabytes a month. And that's bandwidth that I have to pay for out of my own pocket. So you can understand why I'm anxious to keep people from "deep linking" my pictures.

My quick bandaid for this problem was to hide the directory the pictures are stored in, and to encrypt the html files and call them up. This worked as people couldn't find where my pictures were so they couldn't link to them. But on the flip side, it takes away some other important functionality such as being able to right click and save the pictures to your hard drive. This ability has since been restored since I have implemented a more permanant solution with the use a special file called ".htaccess" which does this: It tells the server to deny access to the picture if the referring URL calling it is from anything but ehowa.com.

So if the files are called from another site (let's say www.yoursite.com) -- the referring URL isn't "ehowa.com" it's "yoursite.com" so the server denies access. And if you try to type in the location of the file directly (let's say you type in "http://www.ehowa.com/directory/picture.jpg" and click "Go") -- the referring URL is [blank] and not "ehowa.com", so the server denies access. Ahhhh, I see the lightbulb just went off in your head. Because now you understand when you have "browser security" enabled on your firewall, and try to view my pictures your firewall sends a [blank] referring URL and thus you are denied access.

There, you now know more about .htaccess files than I did a week ago. Now go forth and multiply!