Who or what is big oscar, and should I be afraid?
Big oscar is a subdomain at AOL, specifically:
http://big.oscar.aol.com/
We make use of a small service offered by AOL, namely, the ability to toggle images for our chat application based on the status of our AOL login. When a page loads that uses this functionality, such as:
http://www.lib.k-state.edu/reference/vref/
or any of our catalog search pages where one finds a Meebo chat widget (or, more accurately, a picture of one), before the image of the chat widget loads, a little query goes out to big oscar, who either says, yes, the library account is logged in, in which case the "click to chat with a librarian" image loads, or no, which loads the "no one available" image. This is completely benign, and in no way poses a security risk.
Why bring this up? If a person uses Internet Explorer and cranks their security settings way up high, IE will flash a warning when this query gets sent to big oscar. Personally, I don't want to use a browser that's such a namby pamby about this kind of stuff (which is why I use Firefox, which applies a lot of common sense security fixes without being so annoying), but some people have been burned or otherwise convinced they need ultra-high security on their machine. Not much we can do there other than tell them to allow it.
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