[I applaud what Thomas is doing -- he says he offers suggestions on how to avoid data retained in a VM swapfile -- though I'd suggest that relying on Windows-IE to guard your privacy is simply insufficient. If you're stuck with Windows, another approach might be to create a PGPdisk volume in which you place your browser's temp files, and configure Opera not to retain data in the first place. --Declan] --- From: "Thomas C. Greene" <tcgreeneat_private> To: "Declan@Well. Com" <declanat_private> Subject: Windows hack for Web-surfing privacy Date: Sun, 9 Dec 2001 21:16:05 -0500 Declan, I think your Politech subscribers will find this interesting. I've been trying to assign the IE browser cache, cookies, typed URLs and history to RAM so they're never written to disk. Of course you can set your browser to delete the cache on exit, but there will be traces on the HDD; and you can block cookies or use a cookie management program, but blocking them makes surfing inconvenient, and cookie managers also leave traces on the HDD. And then there's the history, which catalogues your comings and goings for posterity. Not even the most sophisticated forensics tool can re-construct your surfing history if it's never written to disk in the first place. I've come up with two rough hacks which accomplish this, one for Windows 95 and 98, and one for 2K and XP. This is pretty beta stuff, admittedly: RamSurf for Win-9x http://213.40.196.62/media/700.zip RamSurf for Win-2K/XP http://213.40.196.62/media/701.zip chrz, t. ================ Thomas C. Greene Washington Bureau Chief The Register mailto:thomas.greeneAtheregister.co.uk http://www.theregister.co.uk ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sun Dec 09 2001 - 18:48:14 PST