I use Windows XP. What can I do to prevent the overly curious guest user from finding porn on my computer?
Just make sure you ahve administrator privlages, stick it somewhere in ‘My Documents’, and make sure the toher accounts do not have admin access. This, of course, requires you to log on and off every time you use your computer, but it is the easiest way to do what you want.
Fortunately, XP doesn’t do that Start… Documents… thing any more that shows a list of the last 24 JPG’s you opened. Unfortunately, it doesn’t show the last 24 word docs, either.
???
That’s how I usually find the porn on people’s computer. I am not looking for porn but working on their PC for this or that problem and while mousing about it shows sometimes ( i move fast with the mouse so don’t always land on the right place) and shows all the porn the person has viewed. Kinda funny really and admittedly sometimes I check the document list on purpose for kicks. Amazing how many poeple forget a about that.
There is a My Recent Documents thing in the Start menu though. I find it quite handy when looking for…um, school papers.
Actually, this is a good question I’ve wondered about myself. Especially wondering if something ever happened to me and I passed away, and what my family members might find if they looked at my computer after my demise.
I’ll be watching for serious answers here…
Heh. Back when I used to care, I hid it inside some innocuous folder and scrubbed my history and cache regularly. Well, I still do that, but not 'cause of porn.
These days there’s a folder marked ‘PORN’ on my desktop. It’s just easier that way.
What if the other user is the admin? Or if you don’t want to do the logging stuff? Any way to encrypt and hide? Uh, just curious. Important documents from work…personal diary…um yeah.
With any files in XP, you can compress them into a .zip file and then open the the compressed file. On the menu select FILE and select Add Password.
To compress the files in the first place, select the files or folder you want to compress and then right click and choose SEND TO compressed (zipped) Folder.
This will copy the files into a new compressed folder with the name:
first file in selection.zip
Hope this is helpful for more than just special interests 
You can stick the folder somewhere out of the way and give it the “Hidden” attribute, then use Control Panel -->Folder Control to not display hidden files and folders. If someone can and does switch this attribute back and has a good snoop round, they can find the dodgy stuff, but not otherwise.
Malacandra, while your suggestion would work around unsuspecting people, the first thing they’d do if they were actually trying to dig something up would be to display hidden files. I would imagine the best place to keep anything secret is in one of the more populated Windows folders, with the filenames changed to .dll or something innocuous. Give them all the same prefix if you need to find them quickly, and clean your recent documents regularly. Nobody will ever find it.
Let’s say you delete your temporary internet files and cookies and clear your History once a week. Can someone still retrace your steps and see where you’ve been, as far as websites? I have no problem admitting I’ve looked at porn sites, but I’ve always had the somewhat-irrational fear that I could click on a link and get led to something illegal, completely unintentionally.
How about PGP on top of that? Encrypt it hard and even if they see it (which they won’t if you put it in an innocently-named folder) they can’t do anything with it.
I did this once but found to my surprise that while the files were inaccessible without the password it was possible to view the contents of the ZIP file. Depending on the names of the files that may be enough to tip someone off what is there.
What you can do is rename the file extensions to something other than .jpg or .avi or whatever.
Put all the porn in one directory. Create a batch file that renames the extensions for you. This is simple.
Using a text editor it might look something like the following:
ren c:\data*.jpg *.wxz
ren c:\data*.avi *.jbq
ren c:\data*.mpg *.xz1
Save the file as with some innocuous name with a .bat extension. For example WIN1.BAT and place it somewhere remote like your System32 directory (if there it can be run just by typing the name in from any directory as System32 is a search path…if the file is not in a search path you have to be in that directory to run it).
Then create a second batch file that does the reverse:
ren c:\data*.wxz *.jpg
ren c:\data*.jbq *.avi
ren c:\data*.xz1 *.mpg
Same thing with naming the text file as .bat so say WIN2.BAT.
Doing this will make the files not open if someone double clicks on them. Windows will ask a person doing so what program they want to use to run that file as it is not recognized. A determined snoop can get around this by trying different programs to open the file till they find one that works but the person would have to be working at this in earnest rather than just happen upon it. If someone pulls the file off of the recent document list the computer will not find it as PORN1.JPG is now PORN1.WXZ. Of course seeing PORN1.JPG in yur document list is a pretty big tip off to whoever but you do what you can.
That said products exist to encrypt your files as well. I think there are some that will give folder level protection (can’t open the folder). PGP is free encryption software you can use. There also exist products that will “clean” your system of all the hints of what you have been doing like your recent browsing activities and so on you might check out. Most of this can be done by hand so this just makes it simpler to go about and also knows the little nooks and crannies Windows likes to use to keep info on what you have been doing and clears it all out.
Yes, through file recovery methods. But I doubt anyone would look that hard without reason. If you are suspected of accessing, ahem, illegal porn, then that would probably be a good reason.
I think this is what they’re talking about if anyone is interested. It looks to be useful.
OK, just curious. Everything I look at is perfectly legal and above-board, but I’ve always wondered about those file recovery methods and how they work.
There are many techniques, but most rely on the fact that when you “delete” a file, you aren’t actually writing over all the data, you’re just writing over the small piece that says “this file is over there ->”. If you don’t put any new data in that space, then all the old data is still there, and can be recovered if you know what to look for. Since lots of common files have recognizable headers, a simple scan of empty space can find lots of stuff.
More sophisticated recovery techniques rely on the fact that, even if the old data is overwritten, magnetic media is not ideal, and sensitive tools can actually detect the old data, sometimes even through several reads and writes.
Ditto. Although mine is called ‘Adult’. And has sub-folders.
What? I’m organized.