gHacks technology news » windows privacy http://www.ghacks.net A technology blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Tue, 24 Nov 2009 16:29:26 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 Index.dat http://www.ghacks.net/2009/01/04/indexdat/ http://www.ghacks.net/2009/01/04/indexdat/#comments Sat, 03 Jan 2009 22:12:54 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=9597 A recent analysis of index.dat files on a Windows XP Service Pack 3 test system revealed hundreds of entries. Index.dat files are hidden files that contain information about visited urls, cookies and other cache related files. The information are only recorded when Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is being used to browse the Internet. What many users do not realize is that data is also recorded if a software program makes use of the Internet Explorer rendering engine.

A few software programs are available to view and delete the contents of index.dat files. We have mentioned some of them earlier here at Ghacks like the index.dat viewer or the index.dat suite. Another tool for the purpose is the index.dat analyzer which can display and clean the contents of index.dat files as well.

If you want to prevent that Windows is writing data to those files in future sessions you need to set the file attribute to read-only. Another possibility would be to run CCleaner regularly (this can be automated) to clean the index.dat files.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2009/01/04/indexdat/feed/ 4 MRU Blaster http://www.ghacks.net/2008/10/03/mru-blaster/ http://www.ghacks.net/2008/10/03/mru-blaster/#comments Fri, 03 Oct 2008 13:20:12 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=7372 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.

mru blaster

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.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2008/10/03/mru-blaster/feed/ 10 Remove Custom Notifications information in Windows http://www.ghacks.net/2007/08/12/remove-custom-notifications-information-in-windows/ http://www.ghacks.net/2007/08/12/remove-custom-notifications-information-in-windows/#comments Sun, 12 Aug 2007 18:08:55 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2007/08/12/remove-custom-notifications-information-in-windows/ Not many Windows users now what the Custom Notifications are or where one could take a look at the elements hidden there. Microsoft describes Custom Notifications as the way in Windows to display active and urgent notifications. These icons show if you have new mail for instance.

The real problem that arises is that past icons are kept there as well which means that everyone can access these information which could be a privacy problem.

Custom Notifications can be accessed by right-clicking the taskbar and choosing Properties from the menu. Click on the Customize button next to the Hide inactive icons entry to see all active and past entries in there – you might be surprised about the amount of icons listed there.

custom notifications

Microsoft does not offer an elegant way to clean past Custom Notifications items which is why I would recommend the Open Source software Past Icons Flusher which cleans all past icons when executed.

The software has a size of only 19K and can be executed from any location, no installation needed.

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