gHacks technology news » privacy

Google Dashboard Offers View Of Google Account Usage

Martin — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:23:51 +0000

Google today launched a new service for Google account holders called Google Dashboard. Google Dashboard is a all-in-one dashboard that offers a decent view of a user’s usage of Google services. The dashboard basically lists specific information about data that each Google service has stored for that Google account. This ranges from information about received and send emails in Gmail over the photos, albums and profile at Google Picasa to subscription information in Google Reader and the latest web searches in Google Search.

A lot of information are displayed in Google Dashboard many with links to the services to look and manage the information. It is likely that a lot of Google users will be surprised at the wealth of information that are displayed in Google Dashboard.

Probably even more useful than the display of the data are links to various privacy policies and options to clear or manage the data that gets stored in the accounts. It is for example possible to use a link to remove items or clear the web history, manage privacy settings in Orkut or Google Reader, manage Gmail https settings or manage Blogger blogs.

In an effort to provide you with greater transparency and control over their own data, we’ve built the Google Dashboard. Designed to be simple and useful, the Dashboard summarizes data for each product that you use (when signed in to your account) and provides you direct links to control your personal settings. Today, the Dashboard covers more than 20 products and services, including Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Web History, Orkut, YouTube, Picasa, Talk, Reader, Alerts, Latitude and many more. The scale and level of detail of the Dashboard is unprecedented, and we’re delighted to be the first Internet company to offer this — and we hope it will become the standard. Watch this quick video to learn more and then try it out for yourself at www.google.com/dashboard.

Google Dashboard is definitely an interesting concept to manage many privacy related tasks from one central interface. Users who want to try it out to see the data that is stored in their Google account can visit the Google Dashboard website directly. (via official Google Blog and Connected Internet.

Tags: Google, google account, google dashboard, google privacy, privacy

Displays Recently Lauched Computer Software In Windows

Martin — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 17:17:06 +0000

The Windows operating system offers quite a few option to find out what its users have been doing recently. It starts with all those temporary folders, time stamps of files, history and log files, the index.dat file and ends with settings that are deeply hidden in the Windows Registry. Average users are usually unaware of many of these possibilities.

The so called MUI Cache is a special cache that contains information about recently launched computer software programs in Windows. The cache does contain application names and paths which can be problematic for several reasons. A system administrator or user with sufficient rights could find out that a user launched applications from removable media. It could also mean that the contents of a hidden or encrypted partition become visible because of this.

Mui Cache View is a Nirsoft application that displays the cache in the usual Nirsoft environment. The portable software program is compatible with several different Microsoft operating systems including Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Vista. It is likely that the program will also work under Windows 7.

It basically creates a list of all applications that are located in the MUI Cache with editing and deleting options. It is possible to edit or delete entries so that they appear in different form or not at all in the cache. Users who want to analyze the programs in detail find export options to do so.

Tags: computer software, mui cache, mui cache view, nirsoft, portable software, privacy, windows software

Internet Privacy Study

Martin — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 14:23:00 +0000

Three researchers of the UC Berkeley School of Information have published results of an Internet privacy study that analyzed web privacy, data collection and information sharing on today’s Internet. Interested users can download the fill Internet privacy report from the project’s website or view the majority of its findings directly on the website.

Each of the four main areas consumer complaints, web bugs, privacy policies and affiliate analysis is divided into key findings, recommendations and methodology. They are complemented by an introduction and an analysis of the top 50 websites on the Internet.

Some interesting findings of the Internet privacy study reveal that Google is able to track users on 92 of the 100 most visited websites on the Internet and still 88% of a total of 393,829 analyzed distinct domains. The high percentage is a combination of services owned by Google including Google Analytics, Google Adsense and DoubleClick.

Microsoft was the company on the second place with an appearance on 60% on the top 100 websites followed by Omniture and Quantcast with 57%. A similar observation was made in the Privacy Policies analysis. All sites making up the top 50 sites of the Internet collect user data and at least 46 share that data with affiliates without disclosing who those affiliates are. The majority on the other hand claims to offer no access to the data to third parties which can be confusing for the user as affiliates are usually seen as third party from the user’s point of view.

The Internet privacy study draws a grim picture of the state of today’s online privacy.

Tags: data collection, information sharing, internet privacy, online privacy, privacy, tracking, web bugs

Proxy Server Usage To Extend Jailtime In The US

Martin — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 19:10:44 +0000

A proxy server can be used for a number of things. People can use it to overcome censorship in their country, to access contents they could otherwise not access or to remain anonymous while performing research on the Internet. Proxy servers to provide a level of anonymity and privacy that makes them a good choice in many situations. A new federal law in the United States is up for voting at the united States Sentencing Commission that can increase the jail time by up to 25% if a proxy server has been used.

Privacy advocates have already expressed great concern as proxy servers are not only in use by individuals who want to protect their privacy but also by companies and even Internet Service Providers, sometimes without the knowledge of the end user. VPN (Virtual Private Network) would for example be classified as proxy servers under the new legislation. As is the popular Tor client that has been created specifically to counter censorship in the world. Several web browsers like Opera Mini or Opera 10 are also making use of proxy servers to compress data to decrease the time it takes to load websites.

The United States Sentencing Commission will vote on the new legislation on April 15. It is set to take effect on November 1 if is is passing the voting process. You can read up on the EFFs stance here

Tags: eff, opera turbo, privacy, proxy, proxy server, tor, united states, vpn, web proxy

Google Update Turns Open Source

Martin — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 16:39:09 +0000

Google Update is a background program by Google that gets installed if the user installs Google software like Google Pack on a computer system. The program has caused some concern – more so than other background updaters with the exception of ctfmon.exe – because of the frequency that it gets reinstalled and reactivated by Google software on the computer system. The annoyance of seeing the Google Update process appear running over and over again after killing and uninstalling it was not the only concern that many users shared.

It was not transparent which data was transferred to Google servers while running Google Updater; And as the software was running in the background all the time it was probably the major concern that was voiced by users and privacy advocates. Google would not be Google if they could not come up with a solution to those privacy concerns: Their solution was to make Google Updater Open Source so that anyone (well not really anyone but those with the skill and knowledge to do so) could analyse the source in detail to find out about the data connections of the application. Google Updater was released with the codename Omaha at Google Code where it can be publicly downloaded.

Users who are interested in removal instructions can take a look at our article about removing Google Update on the Windows operating system.

Tags: Google, google privacy, google software, google update, google updater, Open Source, privacy

UK. Sensitive Information. Need We Say More?

Martin — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 16:32:48 +0000

The massive increase in data collection throughout the world has not led to responsible data storage laws. That is an imbalance that becomes obvious especially in one country these days. The UK is amassing heaps of data about their citizens for their fight against terrorism (and other causes) but is failing miserably over and over again when it comes to securing that data.

Think of past stories like top secret information in a digital camera that got sold for a few pounds on eBay or the discovery of an USB stick outside a pub containing information about 12 million British citizens.

This time it was mere paper that was responsible for a data leak. Most users would think that pre-computer age politicians would know how to handle at least secure information on paper properly. This is apparently not the case as police chief Bob Quick managed to carry a document marked secret in public which immediately caught the attention of bystanding photographers.

The document, which can be viewed on the Guardian’s website contained information about an anti-terrorist raid. The details were extensive including names, addresses and command structures. The raid had to be conducted in bright daylight because of the security leak.

As Dante, who send me a link to the story points out: “It’s not just electronic security that
counts. It’’s also what happens when a user prints out the data.”

Tags: bob quick, data leak, data privacy, data security, information, privacy, Security, united kingdom

Protect your privacy from Google AdSense’s new behavioral ads

Joe — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 23:01:36 +0000

Google recently launched behavioral targeted ads for AdSense. This means AdSense displays adverts not only on the context of the webpage, but on the context of your browsing history. The aim is to provide more relevant and efficient adverts, but tracking cookies being used across hundreds of thousands of websites raises obvious privacy issues, as Google can use this information to log website you have been on.

Usually, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is very critical of big corporations who intrude on people’s privacy, but their criticism was not very harsh. Why? Because Google has developed a web browser plug-in that permits users to opt-out of this scheme.

The plug-in is available for Internet Explorer and Firefox and modifications to browser preferences in Chrome and Safari also allow people to opt-out. Google also maintains an ‘Ad Preferences Manager‘ which allows this tracking cookie to be disabled until the next time cookies are wiped.

There are several reasons to disable these cookies. Firstly, you may not entrust Google with your details. Secondly, adverts based on past browsing may be displayed to other users of the computer… not perfect if, for example, you were buying a present for a family member and they are suddenly swarmed with advertisements about it!

Most tracking cookies can be disabled if you modify browser settings. In Firefox, for example, in Preferences>Privacy, you can refuse to ‘accept third party cookies’.

Tags: Adsense, advertising, behavioral ads, cookies, doubleclick, firefox, Google, google adsense, internet-explorer, privacy, protect privacy, safety, Security, tracking cookies

Google Docs Shares Documents Without Permisson

Martin — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 09:57:41 +0000

Cloud computing is a buzz word. It has been made popular with services like Google Docs which allow users to store their documents on a server on the Internet. While it surely is comfortable to have the documents stored on servers with the ability to work with them and share them with trusted individuals words of concern has been raised lately. Most of the concern was security and privacy related. Users are basically handing over their documents to a third party. They gain accessibility but lose lots of control over their documents.

A letter that has been send out by the Google Docs team seems to have made the worst case scenario true for some users of the online service. According to Techcrunch who received a copy of a letter that has been send out the following happened: The Google Docs team identified a bug in their online service that may have caused the sharing of documents without the knowledge or permission of the user.

“This inadvertent sharing was limited to people with whom you, or a collaborator with sharing rights, had previously shared a document. The issue only occurred if you, or a collaborator with sharing rights, selected multiple documents and presentations from the documents list and changed the sharing permissions. This issue affected documents and presentations, but not spreadsheets.”

While it is unclear as to how many users have actually been affected by the bug it does outline the problems of storing documents, files and information on the Internet. There is always a chance that the documents will fall into hands that they are not intended for.

Tags: cloud computing, data security, docs, Google, google docs, Online Services, privacy, Security, web services

How To Anonymize iTunes Songs

Martin — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 14:30:28 +0000

One of our readers pointed out that the application that we reviewed a while back to anonymize iTunes songs had been down for a while. He suggested another method of getting rid of user identifying data in iTunes. The iTunes plus songs contain three obvious fields that can be used to identify the user. The EFF is suspecting that each song might contain even more fields that can be used to identify the user.

The actual process of anonymizing itunes songs involves the usage of two different programs: Atomic Parsley and Hexfiend. Atomic Parsley will be used to remove the application ID which is usually the email address of the user who purchased the song and the purchase data. The software is available for Windows, Linux and Mac.

A basic command that can be very helpful is to display all information about a song using the software. To do this run the following command:

atomicparsley song.m4u -t

This will list all tags and their values in the same command window making it easy to spot the identifying ones.

Tags can be removed with the command

atomicparsley song.m4a –manualAtomRemove “moov.udta.meta.ilst.TAG”

where TAG has to be replaced with a valid name. To remove both the application ID and purchase data from an iTunes song one would issue the following command:

atomicparsley song.m4a –-manualAtomRemove “moov.udta.meta.ilst.apID” –-manualAtomRemove “moov.udta.meta.ilst.purd” -W

An alternative would be to remove all tag information at once using the following command which is currently the only way to ensure that the song will not contain user identifying information afterwards. It will however clear all tags including title, artist and other related tags.

AtomicParsley song.m4a –metaEnema

After finishing the first step of anonymizing iTunes songs we still have to remove the name of the buyer that is contained in the songs. To do that a hexeditor like Hexfiend is needed. Simply open the iTunes song in Hexfiend and search for the name. Once the name is found replace it with other chars that match the exact length of the name. Save the file under a different file name and check out that it still plays fine in your favorite music player.

Tags: anonymize itunes songs, apple itunes, atom remove, atomicparsley, itunes, itunes anonymity, itunes privacy, privacy, privatunes, software

Browsing History

Martin — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 18:32:29 +0000

Almost every web browser is storing browsing history information by default. This includes opened websites, downloaded files, form data or bookmarks that have been saved. All of these information can be used to create a profile about the surfing habit of the user.

Historian is a free portable software program that can process the browsing history of several popular web browsers and export the information into csv or text format. Supported browsers are Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox 2 and 3, Google Chrome and Opera. This includes information about bookmarks, the browsing history, downloads, cookies and cache information.

The usability of the software program is not optimal. One has to drag and drop the files that are storing the information from the web browser’s directories into the interface to process them. This can obviously only be done if the user knows the location and names of those files. It is likely that only a minority knows that Firefox is storing its bookmarks in a file called places.sqlite or that Opera is storing information about file downloads in download.dat.

The only other limitation is that the only files of the same type can be analyzed at the same time. There is practically no way of adding all browsing history files of various installed web browsers in one go to the application because of their different formats. The workaround would be to create the csv files (or text) for each source file and copy paste the information into one big csv file in the end.

It would be a great improvement if the software developer would add an automatic scan of the system to the software program. It would also be nice if different files could be queued in the application so that they could be processed together.

Historian on the other hand is a versatile portable program that can identify the browsing history of all popular web browsers with the exception of Safari.

Tags: browser history, Browsing History, firefox history, historian, internet explorer history, opera history, privacy, web browser

Monitor Computer Activity

Martin — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 17:09:07 +0000

The Windows operating system records all kinds of information during computer usage. It records what searches are performed on the computer system, what programs are opened or saved, which urls are opened and which documents have been opened recently.

While many users do not worry about those information some prefer to manage which information get recorded and which do not.

Win Spy is a free software program that can monitor computer activity, or to be more precise to display what has been recorded by the Windows operating system in the past. It displays general operating system items like the recent documents but also Internet Explorer specific records extracted from the index.dat file.

Each of the eight different histories can be accessed by clicking on the tabs on top of the application. Files can be executed by double-clicking them. While the application is great to monitor computer activity it does not come with the means to erase the information.

A simple web search usually provides the tools to delete those information from the computer system.

Tags: computer activity, computer history, monitor computer, Monitor Computer Activity, privacy, win spy, windows history, windows software

Private Browsing Not So Private After All

Martin — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 09:27:04 +0000

The last year or so has been filled with announcements about private browsing. Each web browser developer implemented or announced plans to add private browsing to their web browser. Private browsing usually means to offer a sandboxed browsing session in computer memory with no information written and stored on the computer’s hard drive. Privacy is one of the biggest buzz words around and will continue to grow in popularity in 2009. The public understanding of private browsing might differ from what private browsing actually does. It definitely does not add privacy to anything that is happening remotely on the Internet. The only gain of private browsing is an increase of privacy in the local environment.

This may however be not the only problem associated with private browsing. A recent paper by security researcher Kate McKinley confirms deficiencies in all web browsers and especially in Apple’s Safari. Not only normal cookie and data handling was tested but also plugin related handling of Flash and Google Gears data. The surprising result was that no browser passed all private browsing tests.

In fact, all of the existing private browsing modes have some form of data which is not cleared when users enter or leave private browsing modes. Although Chrome cleared the only tested type of data it stored, it was surprising to find that Gears data was not cleared, since Gears is included in the browser. However, this behavior is consistent across all browsers tested, as we will see later.

Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 clears cookies and session storage properly, but the persistent storage (window.globalStorage) is preserved between a normal and private browsing session.With IE 8 (Beta 2), both cookies and session storage were cleared properly, however the IE user Data stores were not cleared between the normal and private browsing sessions.

Safari on Windows fared the worst of all in these tests with respect to private browsing, and did not clear any data at all, either before entering or after exiting the private mode. On OSX, Safari’s behavior was quirky; in no case was the HTML 5 database storage cleared before or after private browsing. Previously set cookies seem to continue to be available if the user entered a private browsing session, but if the user started the browser and went directly into private browsing, it seemed to behave as expected.

All browsers have troubles with Flash Cookies and their private browsing modes. This is largely due to the way Flash Cookies are created and stored (without user interaction and means to display warnings). So what’s the conclusion in this matter? Users who like to use the private browsing mode should not use Apple’s Safari in its current stage. They should also make sure to either disable Flash and other third party plugins or use settings that prevent them from acting automatically (for example by using NoScript in Firefox).

Check out the Flash Cookies Explained article if you want to read up on Flash Cookies and find out where they are stored and how they can be deleted from a computer system.

Tags: flash, flash cookies, google chrome, internet privacy, internet-explorer, mozilla-firefox, privacy, private browsing, safari, web browser

Firephorm – the anti-phorm Firefox extension

Martin — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 08:14:41 +0000

We have covered Phorm before at Ghacks. It is a very scary cooperation between several Internet Service Providers and advertising companies. The Internet Service Providers install tracking cookies on user systems and create a unique profile for each user which is then used by the advertising agencies to display targeted advertisement to the user. Especially British Internet Service Providers seem inclined to make use of Phorm to earn an extra bug. The best way of dealing with such companies would be change to another phorm-free provider as soon as possible. This however is not always possible. That’s when anti-phorm tools come into play. They are also great for the time it takes to transfer the account from one provider to another.

Why is Phorm so dangerous? The tracking is definitely a privacy issue. The user cannot opt out of the tracking and data like search queries and visited websites are stored and analyzed. Since British companies are world renowned for data safety it is only a matter of time before data leaks user profiles.

Firephorm is a Firefox extension that is forging the cookies placed on the system to make the tracking system useless. It provides the option to forge the master cookie and the tracking cookies to either poison the system by using random cookies, using an opt-out cookie or from an UID list specified by the user.

The Firefox extension modifies http requests and response headers and can also warn the user if a webpage request was redirected via Phorm’s webwise.net.

Tags: advertisement, firefox phorm, firephorm, internet service provider, phorm, privacy, tracking, tracking cookies

Right To Search Laptops To Be Limited On US Borders

Martin — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 14:31:55 +0000

The right of US border guards to search the laptops will be limited today according to a news post at news site Vnunet. The current policy in the United States poses a risk to anyone traveling to the United States. Border guards can practically search the contents of a laptop including private emails, visited websites and view documents, pictures and videos that are stored on the website. Laptops can be kept for an undefined time for data analysis if the border guards chooses so.

The bill was introduced by three Democratic senators to protect data from random searches. The news article is not clear in at least two areas and requires further analysis. The article mentions law-abiding Americans a few time and one could interpret that the new bill will only protect data of US citizens from being searched randomly.

The second issue that is not clear if the bill only protects data on laptops or data on all digital devices such as mobile phones, PDAs or iPods. An article published on The Register seven days ago confirmed that the new bill will prevent

According to a Register article that was published a week ago the new bill will affect any electronic devices from being searched randomly at US borders. The article seems to imply that this affects all visitors and not only US citizens.

Tags: border agents, civil rights, laptops, privacy, united state, us

PDF Meta Edit

Martin — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 13:11:58 +0000

Like Microsoft Office documents Adobe PDF documents contain meta information that can sometimes reveal information that the author does not want to be accessible by readers. Meta information such as the author name, the application the PDF document was created with or PDF file creation dates are easily accessible by anyone analyzing the document closely.

PDF Meta Edit (the complete name is BeCyPDFMetaEdit) is a software program for Windows that provides not only means to view the PDF document meta information but also means to edit them. The application can be downloaded as a portable version or one that needs to be installed on the computer system.

Functionality is the same and the software program opens the file browser immediately after starting the application. After loading one pdf document from the computer it will display the meta information in the first of eight tabs.

The program displays the title, author, keywords, subject, software that was used to create the pdf document, file creation and modification dates and copyright notices in that tab. Each of the information can be edited individually. The Clear All Fields button alternatively clears all information at once from the PDF document.

PDF documents use XMP metadata in addition to the one that is displayed directly. If the document’s meta data is edited by the user he should also make sure that the XMP metadata is deleted to avoid conflicts.

The six remaining tabs contain additional information about the document. The Viewer Preference tab for instance defines the page and layout of the document while the Bookmark’s tab lists available bookmarks.

Tags: adobe pdf, editing pdf documents, pdf document, pdf edit, pdf meta edit, portable software, privacy, windows software

MRU Blaster

Martin — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 13:20:12 +0000

MRU Blaster (via Technix) is a software program for Windows operating systems that cleans the Most Recently Used files on the computer system. Microsoft thought it would be a good idea to store files that have been recently used in various places to offer the users a way to load those files more quickly the next time they are needed.

What Microsoft has not taken into account are privacy sensitive users who do not like this type of information recorded on their system. The cleaner MRU Blaster takes care of the most recently updated files in Windows by deleting the information in Windows.

CCleaner was used to test the effectiveness of MRU Blaster by cleaning Windows with it before running MRU Blaster. Even after cleaning the system with CCleaner the program did find 257 entries that could be additionally cleaned on the system.

The user can specify the applications and locations that should be scanned and cleaned in the program’s settings which is also the location to download the two available plugins that clean cookies and temporary files.

MRU Blaster comes with a scheduler that can be set to run in specified intervals. The application has to be running in the background for this though.

Tags: most recently used, mru blaster, privacy, privacy software, windows privacy, windows software

Web Proxy Server List

Martin — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 17:14:51 +0000

Keeping up with web proxy servers on the Internet can be a time consuming task. Proxies come and go that quickly that one could say it is nearly impossible to keep up unless someone would use scripts to check the web proxies automatically. The web proxy server list posted on Ghacks dates back two years and the main reason it was not updated is the fact that updating the servers would have to be done dynamically to provide visitors with a working list of proxy servers.

That is probably the same line of thought that the developer of Prime Proxies had when he created his website. The website publishes an up to date list of working web proxy servers which are checked regularly so that the chance of encountering a non working proxy server is slim.

Proxies are divided into three categories that are named after the proxy script that is being used on the proxy websites. The three main scripts are PHP Proxy, CGI Proxy and Glyph. Some proxy scripts work better on specific websites than others and it comes down to finding the web proxy server script that displays the favorite websites properly.

The Prime Proxies database contains a list of more than 2300 working and 5000 dead proxy servers. That should be enough for everyone to find a web proxy server that is working and not banned at the location that you are accessing the Internet.

Tags: anonymity, internet, privacy, proxy list, proxy server, web proxies, web proxy, web proxy server

Index.dat Viewer

Martin — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 09:35:07 +0000

If you perform a search for index.dat files on a computer that is running Windows you will most likely end up with dozens of files with that name. The index.dat file is used by Microsoft Internet Explorer as a database that contains cookies, urls and recently opened files. This information remains stored in the index.dat file even if the user is clearing cookies and the history in Internet Explorer.

An index.dat viewer is a tool that can display the information stored in those database files. Index.dat Scanner is such a viewer that can scan all index.dat files on the computer that it can located or a specific one that the user selects from the system. The scan takes some time but results are displayed as they are found.

The software program will list all of its findings in a list that can be exported as a text document. It did find more than 4000 entries on the test computer although Internet Explorer itself was rarely used on it. The information listed in the index.dat databases list recently opened files, urls that the user visited in the past and cookies that have been stored during browsing sessions.

The index.dat files are by default hidden locked system files that cannot be deleted in Windows directly. Several tools like CCleaner exist that can clear the contents of index.dat files on a Windows system directly which is probably the easiest way to clean those files. Index.dat Scanner can be used to check if all traces have been deleted in the files.

It is obviously important to run the cleanup regularly because the files get populate whenever a file gets opened or Internet Explorer opens a website.

Tags: clean index.dat, index.dat, index.dat scanner, index.dat viewer, privacy, software, Windows

Gmail Has a Privacy Problem

Martin — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 22:23:03 +0000

You might have already read it elsewhere that it is possible to reveal the real name of any Gmail user by sharing a calendar in Google Calendar with him. Let me explain how this is done. Google Calendar can be loaded in the header area of Gmail after logging in. A click on settings will load the settings where users can change all sorts of information like the date format and time zone.

A click on the Calendars tab loads the calendars that are currently active. A click on the Calendar loads the details of that calendar with information about the calendar timezone and addresses. There is also another tab in that view that lets the user share the calender with other users.

A click on the Share This Calendar tab displays a list of all users who have access to this calendar with the option to add new users by pasting their email address into the form field.

The problem arises if a Gmail email address is pasted into that field. Nothing happens until the changes have been saved and the question if the user should be invited if he does not use Google Calendar is denied.

The full name of the user is disclosed int he Share This Calendar tab even if that user has chosen a gmail address that is not made up of his first and last username.

This might not seem like a big deal for many users but this is a honeypot for spammers. All they need to do is enter email addresses to find out the real name of the user to send out personalized spam. You probably would not react to a phishing mail asking you to login to your eBay account if the name would be missing or be wrong but what about if the real name would be there ?

Tags: Email, gmail, google-mail, privacy, spam

Clean After Me

Martin — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 09:55:20 +0000

Clean After Me is a new software by the well respected NirSoft developers. The application is as usual portable and can be executed right from its location. The main purpose of the software is to clean the system after it was used in order to protect the user’s privacy which is also the main difference to disk cleaners like Crap Cleaner or Disk Cleaner which remove temporary files as well and have to be installed on the system.

The program’s main interface provides easy access to several check-boxes divided into categories like Windows Explorer, Firefox, Windows General and Windows Advanced. It is possible to check each category which would have the effect that every item under that category would be cleaned or to check individual items instead.

The software concentrates on traces that a user leaves on a system and provides cleanup routines to delete those traces in the Registry, in logs and temporary files on the host system.

After selecting the items that should be removed from the system the user can either clean the items directly by clicking on the button Clean Selected Items or create a report of the items that will be deleted first. This report appears in the status pane of the software.

Clean After Me is compatible to Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Vista.

Tags: ccleaner, clean after me, disk cleaner, nirsoft, privacy, traces

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