Private Internet Browsing

[burningame]

Don't forget, for Windows, Flash player cookies can also be handled directly from the Flash dialogue, to be found in Control Panel. You can delete them there without having to go to the Adobe site, with its weird interface - "this is not a picture"!

I guess there would be a similar dialogue in Apple.

Also if you use Firefox you can get an add-on called "Better Privacy" which you can set to automatically delete Flash cookies when you close the browser.

[pov603]

@Terence.drew many thanks for the info regarding 'cookies'.

[burningame]

Having said that, this is really basic internet security 101, and I find it hard to believe that any of the regulars here haven't come across flash cookies before. I mean, are they any more 'monstrous' than Google's search cookies which record all your searches for thirty years?

[Terence.drew]

Having said that, this is really basic internet security 101, and I find it hard to believe that any of the regulars here haven't come across flash cookies before. I mean, are they any more 'monstrous' than Google's search cookies which record all your searches for thirty years?

Normal cookies are deletable within your browser when you reset/clear it. These ones are stored on your computer in an area outside of your brower's files and remain there and you do not know about them. Firefox is the worst. They make a big thing about being this and that, and we are this and we are that, and yet never told anyone about these. Change to a different browser. There is an add on called better privacy which you allude to for Firefox which is good at deleting these. Safari seems to do better but only when you select don't accept cookies from third parties.
There are class actions afoot regarding the use of supercookies and many people are hugely pissed off by them.

Their use is allegedly something to do with placing banners in your new webpage. These are big files though (.5 mb).

If you have ever visited a porn site you will find the site has left a little present in your macromedia folder (I did once!!!) As has youtube. Ebay. and most of the other big sites..

Google cookies are deleted when you reset your browser (allegedly) . The data they keep on you is another issue. Staying logged into a google account all day is madness. Pure and simple.

[burningame]

If you have ever visited a porn site you will find the site has left a little present in your macromedia folder (I did once!!!)

yeah, I did that once!

[reel.deal]

full link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPa53bV7SLc

[philipsmovies]

Hi Simon

A very beautiful home you have. Thank you for being so honest. I visited Frascati briefly in 1997 while on holiday in Rome-i had planned to look at some vineyards and beautiful scenery but got tired. I had a very fine meal at a family owned Trattoria in the village-i was quite touched at the warm welcome i got.

Saluti

Philip

[fbenario]

Hey Firefox users - I keep 8 tabs open at all times, and in the morning when I first start Firefox it takes 1:50, terribly slowly. I made these changes, and it cut the load time to 35 seconds. Give it a try.

Increase the Speed in Which Firefox loads pages

1. Type “aboutconfig” into the address bar and hit Enter.
(Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.)

2. Alter the entries as follows:
Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”
Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”
Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to some number like 10.
This means it will make 10 requests at once.

3. Lastly, right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0“;.(Zero)
This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives. If you’re using a broadband connection you’ll load pages faster now.

I forgot to keep the URL. Sorry.

[burningame]

startpage.com and privacy search engines

Until quite recently I’ve been a dedicated, daily Scroogle user (ever since Google discovered the true meaning of evil). I liked the way it deleted all search terms records within 24 hours, the way it returned 100 search results by default without saving cookies (I regularly delete browser/LSO cookies and cache). Not to mention its wicked, ironic little anti-Google cartoons. [maybe reel.deal has come across them before?; alas I can find no link.]

"Give me the child till the age of seven and I will show you the man." was the Jesuits’, if not Michael Apted’s, catch-cry. Now I’m afraid it’s “Give me the search terms a man uses, and I will tell you everything about his life” (and while you’re about it, give me the IP address, etc and I’ll tell you where he lives).

Scroogle was a non-profit privacy concern operation, a scraper that returned Google search results, minus the privacy hack. (Google keeps records of your searches for years, if they ever deleted them at all.)

http://donttrack.us/

Now it seems Scroogle has been dealt a death blow by Google, just in the last couple of weeks.

Take note, all those who think Google is some portal to, or oracle of combined knowledge of the human race. It is just as manipulated as the bogus 911 imagery reviewed on this site. It, along with Wikipedia and most probably even Youtube, are simply not to be trusted on sensitive contemporary issues, which makes them, I believe, a continuing dilemma for the researchers here - though I’m pretty sure most of the thinkers here are well aware of this paradox.

Now I’m well aware of the argument that Google has a right to protect it’s technology, to wit: if other companies are allowed to get Google results, they could post their own ads and collect revenue. That means our very ‘right’ to search is a qualified asset which has a monetary value. But surely the internet should be ‘free’ - or am I being too naïve?

Next they’ll be selling the very air we breathe.

You cannot even find Scroogle on the web at all at the moment. That’s because:

"Daniel Brandt started his 'Scroogle' search engine because he wanted to provide increased privacy to people who searched online through Google. Unfortunately, while Google tolerated this for a while, they began throttling Scroogle queries. This, in combination with extensive DDoS attacks on Brandt's servers, has caused him to take Scroogle offline, along with his other domains. He said,

'I no longer have any domains online. I also took all my domains out of DNS because I want to signal to the criminal element that I have no more servers to trash. This hopefully will ward off further attacks on my previous providers. Scroogle.org is gone forever. Even if all my DDoS problems had never started in December, Scroogle was already getting squeezed from Google's throttling, and was already dying. It might have lasted another six months if I hadn't lost seven servers from DDoS, but that's about all.'

Internet users who made use of the services will now need to investigate other options."

[Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday February 22, @12:11AM from the rock-and-a-hard-place dept.]

http://search.slashdot.org/story/12/02/22/0131205/privacy-centric-search-engine-scroogle-shuts-down

see also:

http://searchengineland.com/scroogle-org-is-gone-forever-says-site-owner-112245

So just in the last few days I’ve started using Startpage search engine.

https://startpage.com/eng/

Here you can save search settings (the main one for me being results=100) by generating a url which you can then bookmark, as opposed to the cookie-setting method of saving preferences which must reside on your computer.

It is still a Google scraper, so returning only Google results. I’ve been dabbling a little bit with other search engines over the last few weeks. I’d be interested to know of other members’ experiences in this regard, please let me know.

This one looks very good too; shame about the name though, which doesn't exactly inspire confidence:

https://duckduckgo.com/

Don’t worry – I’m under no false illusions - by using these 'secure' search engines I have about as much hope, deep down, of any privacy concerns being allayed as I do about the truth about 911 ever coming out in the media. But then, one doesn’t have to make it easy for them, does one?

[burningame]

I see Mr Wikipedia-himself, Jimmy Wales, has commented in that thread re Scroogle founder Daniel Brandt:

"I don't regard [Brandt] as a valid source about anything at all, based on my interactions with him. I tried very hard to help him, and he misrepresented nearly everything about our conversation in his very strange rant. He considers the very existence of a Wikipedia article about him to be a privacy violation, despite being a public person. I find it hard to take him very seriously at all. He misrepresents everything about our procedures, claiming that we have a 'secret police' and so on." - Jimbo Wales

[url]http://encyclopediadramatica.ch/Daniel_Brandt [encyclopediadramatica.ch][/url]

http://search.slashdot.org/story/12/02/22/0131205/privacy-centric-search-engine-scroogle-shuts-down

a 'secret police'? Wickedpedia? No!

I know one thing for sure. They gatekeep like there's no tomorrow. (Or maybe that's gay-tekeep, see user: hyacinth). I wanted to update the entry on 13th chords (music; jazz chords). In the Wikipedia entry, they're at best simply re-iterating the same, tired old nineteenth-century explanation, worse: they're confusing the issue a hundred-fold. It's as clumsy as hell! I can see in the talk pages many people who have attempted to change things for the better, but no luck. What's going on?