FC: Thomas Greene: A Windows hack for web-surfing privacy

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

[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" <tcgreene () bellatlantic net>
To: "Declan@Well. Com" <declan () well com>
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




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