Think you deleted your cookies? Think again

[Guest]

Quote:WIRED) -- More than half of the Internet's top websites use a little known capability of Adobe's Flash plugin to track users and store information about them, but only four of them mention the so-called Flash Cookies in their privacy policies, UC Berkeley researchers found.

Unlike traditional browser cookies, Flash cookies are relatively unknown to web users, and they are not controlled through the cookie privacy controls in a browser. That means even if a user thinks they have cleared their computer of tracking objects, they most likely have not.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/08/12/deletin...vacy/index.html

[FastTadpole]

Firefox Browser Extension that deletes "super" cookies.
http://netticat.ath.cx/BetterPrivacy/BetterPrivacy.htm

Another competing plugin is also available called Objection, which I haven't tested
http://objection.mozdev.org/

Neither open source so it is hard to tell if these plugins are spyware themselves though and require research as to how to plugins interact with the browser and the internet, prehaps via packet tracking.

Disabling the flash plugins on your browsers or going into your flash prefs/config would circumvent this type of tracking as well.

More info on "Super" Cookies
http://privacychoice.wordpress.com/tag/flash-cookies/

[Guest]

When in doubt use an OS loaded to a USB stick in a mode that doesn't persist with changes. I use MCNLive and them tracking mo-fo's lose my trail every reboot.

[FastTadpole]

Quote:When in doubt use an OS loaded to a USB stick in a mode that doesn't persist with changes. I use MCNLive and them tracking mo-fo's lose my trail every reboot.

Good advice, that certainly works too. Portable versions of software are a good idea too. Firefox is open source [ ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/ ] but it is probably best to compile your own version rather than the windows installer, exe. GNU Linux [ http://www.gnu.org/software/ ] is an open source OS so you (or others) can transparently search for built-in monitoring.

That being said ISPs log all traffic and most fibre optic cables route your activity to other unconfirmed destinations as well. So, in essence it would be very difficult to circumvent monitoring by those parties.

Legally speaking, monitoring has been put to the test and it was determined that it was fair game to intercept and read emails and doesn't fall under the same federal law protection as mail/postal tampering.

[Guest]

Quote:That being said ISPs log all traffic and most fibre optic cables route your activity to other unconfirmed destinations as well. So, in essence it would be very difficult to circumvent monitoring by those parties.

This is true but OTOH every time I read a case of criminal computer wrong-doing, ie: child pr0n, possessing info useful for "terrorists" etc etc it's
always established in the news things like "police found over 2500 images of children in sexual acts". I've never once read of a pedo or whatnot
convicted by virtue of ISP logs. It usually turns up on their 'puter, perhaps when taking it to a repair shop.

Given that, nothing beats a computer with no harddisk or storage ability.

Hacking this box or infecting it with something will only, and can only affect me until the next reboot.

I would urge everyone to get USB based linux for sensitive emails and the like.

[Dunamis]

Some really good info here, cheers. I hadn't thought of the increased privacy by using a USB OS to connect. Thing is, say your box is connected through the hardline to your router, would that not just mean all the info passing over the USB OS connection to the net would be attached to your IP anyway?

[yeti]

An OS running from a USB stick is NOT SAFE unless the stick is mounted read-only. It's safer to use a DVD or CD based OS.

As for info passing over the internets, it is easily readable unless you only use encryped protocols.

[capnchronic]

Shouldn't this be a non issue for anyone running a Windows Washer type program? I'd assume anyone who's privacy minded would be running something along those lines and just depending on "Clear cookies" in their browser's options.

[thokling]

Something I was playing around with last year is HTML5 storage.

It's different from regular cookies and LSO (Flash cookies), offering up to 5MB of storage space per domain (each subdomain shares that space). There are APIs available to make use of it, and it's fairly simple to implement in PHP.

Also see Evercookie, which documents the myriad ways Evercookie uses to store information in a Web browser, including Flash LSO.

I did find a page that documents, at least in Firefox 3.6, how to delete Evercookies:

http://www.monirulislam.com/general-web-...firefox-3/

I haven't tried it yet, mind you. Probably not too far from doing that.

[Shinobi]

^ My mate can sort it out!