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Browser Privacy Test
lazyforker writes "A NYTimes blog post reports the results of security researcher Kate McKinley's tests of various browsers' (FireFox, Chrome, IE, Safari) privacy protection mechanisms. Specifically she tested their cookie handling. She also examined their handling of Flash's cookies. In summary: Safari on Mac OS X (in the 'private browsing' mode) is not so private ('quirky'). Safari on XP is not private at all. Flash behaves awfully everywhere."
Om nom nom nom nom!!!
My undies are blue.
:(
I'm secretly in love with my best friend's wife, but I like gay midget porn.
[preview]
Damn, Firefox privacy test failed
Flash behaves awfully everywhere
FlashBlock
NoScript works too but I find it sort of annoying because it stops half the web from working.
Under what circumstances does Flash not behave awfully? Despite being a Linux fan, and more than a little cold on Microsoft (though I did buy an Xbox 360 - matter of price at the time...), I almost hope Silverlight takes off so Adobe have some serious, commercially driven competition for Flash. Maybe then they won't take their user base for granted and; oh I don't know, maybe put some work into making Flash GOOD?
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
I was just wondering who Kate McKinley really is. Most of all, I am skeptical as to whether she is even qualified to be called a "security researcher" at all.
Why? Because Wikipedia returns no hits for "Kate McKinley" and a Google search returns results that are sketchy or even anemic when it comes to browser security at best.
May be I should also put up my own research...may be, then call my self a "Security researcher."
Microsoft's Internet Explorer, as the mos tpopular browser, disproves tha tpopularity does not equate to the perception of security.
A better basis for the selection of browsers would be to select those thought to be secure. That would eliminate IE and Safari at the start, and it might even add Opera.
Posting this anonymously, for reasons that will soon be evident.
You do realize that you didn't have to use your real sexual preferences as an example, don't you?
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I like your logic: Aside from a single tile, Columbia's last mission went flawlessly.
Seriously, though: you've underlined the single greatest problem in computer security today - what we don't see can hurt us. I've written about this at greater length elsewhere, but to put it simply, privacy is the battleground of our decade.
The struggle to come to terms with privacy will manifest itself in the legal, moral and ethical arenas, but it arises now because of technology and the cavalier approach that the vast majority of people take to it.
The ramifications of our ability to transmit, access and synthesise vast amounts of data using technology are consistently underestimated by people because of the simple fact that, as far as they're concerned, they are sitting in the relative privacy of their own room with nothing but the computer screen as an intermediary.
On the consumer side of things, this creates what Schneier calls a Market for Lemons in which the substance of the product becomes less valuable than its appearance. As long as we have the illusion of security, we don't worry about the lack of real protection.
On the institutional side, we see countless petty abuses of people's privacy. There is nothing stopping a low-level employee from watching this data simply out of prurient interest. In fact, this kind of abuse happens almost every time comprehensive surveillance is conducted. In a famous example, low-level staffers in the US National Security Agency would regularly listen in on romantic conversations between soldiers serving in Iraq and their wives at home. The practice became so common that some even created 'Greatest Hits' compilations of their favourites and shared them with other staffers.
They would never have done so had the people in question been in the room, but because the experience is intermediated by an impersonal computer screen, which can inflict no retribution on them, their worst instincts get the better of them.
When discussing software in the 21st Century, we cannot ever treat privacy as just one incidental aspect of a greater system. Privacy defines the system. Starting an argument by throwing it aside in the first subordinate clause gives little weight to any argument that follows.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
For Linux users you want to (after rm'ing) symlink ~/.adobe and ~/.macromedia to /dev/null.
Actually for Flash you should take a look at these instructions which will work cross-platform.
WTF gave you the idea that's a konqueror bug? Why would opening a document in OOo, which isn't even developed/shipped by the same (upstream) people as konqueror, be a konqueror bug?
No, rather, as AC already posted, konqueror will with default associations as shipped by upstream (KDE), using the "view source" function, open pages using kwrite or kate or kedit. Assuming it's not a PEBCAK issue of the local sysadmin or user, OOo at least as shipped by Ubuntu appears to change that default by associating HTML (or possibly XML) files with itself, at a higher priority than kwrite/whatever-else. That's either Ubuntu's fault or OOo's (or the sysadmin/user for overriding the distribution defaults, if that's why the associations are set the way they are), but it certainly isn't KDE/Konqueror's, as KDE isn't what setup those associations, it's just doing what it's supposed to and following the file associations config as setup on the system it's installed on, as overruled by the config of the user running it, if they have chosen to do so.
Looked at a different way, it would be either OOo's bug, for having a recent documents history that can't be disabled (if that's indeed the case), or a user PEBCAK, for not disabling said history or wiping it out after opening a document they don't wish to appear in said history.
Duncan
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master,
and if you use the program, he is your master."
R Stallman