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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.
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.
Maybe she's a privacy expert too.
Fifty years of Yippie! 1968-2018
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.
SWF is open
every time someone repeats this lie i end up posting a link to this film: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoNvsiBTQDE
Pragmatically, is there a really important reason why you want the Flash Player to be entirely open? Would an open source Flash Player really be a better working piece of software than what we've got now?
it would allow me to do everything a wanted with a non-intel architecture. flash is the last bastion of hardware (and operating system) lock-in for me.