What your PC knows about you!

[cousinlucky]

Is this stuff true??

What Your PC Knows About You by Mark Nestmann

[hazel]

What it says about Flash cookies is true. They are quite separate from ordinary browser cookies and they reinstate themselves when deleted. I think I posted something about this myself earlier. The solution is obvious: don't use Flash. Use an open-source equivalent like gnash. Proprietary software never has your interests at heart.


btw congratulations on your enthusiast status, Lucky.

[oz]

Proprietary software never has your interests at heart.

Isn't that the truth?

I rarely ever install Flash, but if I should need it, it gets installed then removed immediately after use, along with the hidden ~/.macromedia folder.

[MikeTbob]

Is this stuff true??

What Your PC Knows About You by Mark Nestmann

It's ten times worse if you use Windows.....that whole OS keeps track of your every move, in more ways than one, but yes it's true.

[Manko10]

For Flash Cookies use BetterPrivacy (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6623/) in your Firefox (if you have one)
My browser deletes all Flash Cookies when I close the browser. Maybe there's some similar add-on for Chromium and Opera.

Regarding Windows' MRU lists: as MikeTbob mentioned Windows keeps track of what you do in your OS but as a quick way to clear those lists you can use a tool such as MRUClear (Download MRUClear 1.6 Free - MRUClear - You view and clear the Windows MRU Lists - Softpedia). Not sure whether this works on Vista or Windows 7 as well because I haven't used it anymore since I abandoned Windows XP but there it worked quite well. If it doesn't work there's surely a similar tool for more recent Windows. Just google for "clear MRU list".

[elija]

Flash cookies are dead easy to deal with.

Open a terminal in your home directory and do the following:

ls -al

Here you should see a .macromedia directory. This is where the cookies are stored. Take a backup of this directory. You can call the destination directory anything you like

cp -a ./.macromedia/* ./saved-evil-stuff/

Now comes the dangerous part. Always be careful when using rm -rf as doing it in the wrong directory may hose your system.

rm -rf ./.macromedia

Finally, the clever part

ln -s /dev/null ./.macromedia

And now flash cookies will never sully your puter again!

[Freston]

rm -rf ./.macromedia

Finally, the clever part

ln -s /dev/null ./.macromedia

And now flash cookies will never sully your puter again!

Would that work like that? Because you're linking what is supposed to be a directory tree to a file.

I've already done it. But I was just thinking, if it would cause errors and where. I mean, if it causes all kinds of errors, it'd be just as effective as

rm -rf .macromedia/* && chmod -R 000 .macromedia  # dial 'R' for 'redundant'

Thinks I

[elija]

Well, I have had no problems yet

[edit]
In Unix-like operating systems, /dev/null or the null device is a special file that discards all data written to it (but reports that the write operation succeeded), and provides no data to any process that reads from it. – source: Wikipedia.
[/edit]

[jayd512]

Nicely done, elija!

Kudos!

Count that one as added to my bag o' tricks!

[Manko10]

I find Flash Cookies quite useful during the session, e.g. for saving the volume level of YouTube videos. Therefore I wouldn't send them to nirvana cross-the-board but after the session is closed (using BetterPrivacy).