We now have at least 5 (probably more) separate threads that appear to relate, at the bottom line, to the appearance of an html "iframe" call to a Chinese site at 2345.com. This seems to be of great concern to lots of people.

I have been able quite easily to find the "offending" code here, but have seen NO VISIBLE EVIDENCE that it does anything in my browser or to my computer.

A check this morning finds that the "iframe" instruction has been removed from the front page source script, and so far as I've been able to tell it never appeared anywhere else at mudcat.

Maybe I missed out on all the fun, but I guess I can live with it.

The iframe tag is a legitimate (sort of) device in newer (non-standard) html versions, and shouldn't, in itself, cause problems. It inserts a frame in your page, and allows you to open another web page inside the frame. Just as when you open a new tab, nothing on the page in the tab - or on the page in the frame - should be able to affect you until you click the tab or click in the frame to make it the active view. There are some rather exotic ways that an open-but-inactive window could pass something, but they're rarely seen.

The 2345 website appears to be a "legitimate" DIRECTORY SITE (a little different than a catalog or archive) intended to tell where to find the ad needed for a particular viewing of a page that calls for one. It should not be expected that what appears in the frame is malware, unless you have reason to believe the 2345 site has been hacked, or the site where the page it actually calls up has been infected. In this respect the 2345 site is no different than the Google sites that pass their ads to you, although the two may have different standards of cleanliness and slightly different levels of risk.

It least that's what it looks like for one who's never seen most of it.

John