“Deleting ‘internet cache and history’ will not protect you” is their common refrain.
If I delete my history, then when why parents start to type “sh” in the address box, “shemalesinleatherwithmidgets.com” won’t drop down, and if I delete temporary internet files, I understand that the visited web pages may not be truly deleted, but isn’t it good enough?
Is it possible these people are talking about folks who illicitly surf the net from work? In such a situation, yeah, you can’t just erase your history and cache files, because your sysadmin has logs of all the sites you accessed. You can’t do anything about that. But in your case, when you just want to stop your parents from seeing where you’ve been, I’d say deleting the cache and history is just fine.
Run a search for a program named “spider”(freeware, I think). It is a utility that can search your drive for places even you didn’t remeber you’ve been. What you find may surprise you.
Those programs just prey on people worried that their friends families / co-workers will discover their left-handed surfing habits. Clearing your cache, erasing cookies, disabling autocomplete for web addresses and clearing the history file does just fine for everyday use. If you’re at work, chances are that the logs are kept at the company firewall, so you can forget tampering with those.
That kind of software is likely to either automate the process of clearing your history, temporary files and so forth, or it may be more like Evidence Eliminator. That’s a particular brand of deletion software (I don’t know how it works) used to ensure something has been irrecoverably deleted.
If it’s the latter type it’s usually more about documents and other application files rather than concealing surfing habits. I’ve had some training in a couple of forensic applications (EnCase and Vogon) which are used to recover deleted documents and fragments for fraud cases. Evidence Eliminator is more of a guard in that kind of ‘serious’ cover-your-tracks situation than casual web surfing.
I have a related question:
When visiting websites, and filling out forms and such, do they know who I am? I mean, my computer is registered to me, and my name is logged somewhere inside this laptop, so when I visit a site, what does it know about me other than the other sites I visited?
Like, I don’t care if someone knows I visit pigeonloversanonymous.com, but I don’t want my name or other info dumped.
Can sites learn your name and such?
There is a site I used to use at work to prevent the company from blocking me from the “good stuff”. Unfortunately I forgot the site, since it has been over a year.
You go to that site and then you can go to any web page you want without anyone (including your sysadmin presumably) knowing because any place you go from there is within this one site whose name I can’t remember.
Sorry if I’m sounding ramblingish or incoherent. I know it’s 2:30 but I have just awoke from a well needed 11 hour sleep (WHOOHOO!!) and I just don’t feel quite awake yet.
Another trick is to use a translator to view the site in question. Use Altavista’s Babelfish to translate Shemalesinleatherwithmidgets.com from whatever language it is in to another language you speak. Chances are though that you only want to see pictures of whatever that particular site might be devoted to (Lord knows what it could be though). In that case, it doesn’t matter what grammatically garbled language the text is in, however the sysadmin’s logs will only show enormous amounts of traffic from the innocuous Altavista rather than She…migdgets.
Moe was talking about safeweb.com. I must say though, that this site serves a valuable function with regards to freedom of information. Especially in totalitarian societies. It would be a shame if it became even slower than it already is because people choose to use it for access to porn.
Just a small note here, while we understand the idea behind this thread and don’t mind it overmuch, the discussion is creeping ever closer to “anonymizer” web sites.
They’ve been used on this site to annoy and harass others and so we don’t allow them. . . and there’s blocks in place for at least some of them that will diminish your ability to navigate this board if you use 'em.
As we find more sites we add them to the list, so what works for you today might not tomorrow. Fair warning.
Sorry we have to be that way, we are aware that some people have legitimate reasons to use the sites but due to the abuse of the situation we just don’t have any choice.
your humble TubaDiva
Administrator
It zero’s out the data fork of the file or application.
Web Root’s “Window Washer” does the same thing as Evidence Eliminator. You can choose the number of times the “areas to be cleaned” are cleaned. That is, 1’s and 0’s are written in the same spot on the drive as the original files. According to WW’s info, the government suggests a minimum of 7 passes. WW allows up to 10. Other stuff, like the “Documents” option found in Windows “Start” menu is cleared amongst other things.
Follow up to this: a lot of companies check their employees’ surfing habits. Not all, but a lot. And large companies paying for Big Five auditors also get IT support in to help review IT security (I should know, I do this for a living). If I’m at a client company, I check that they review their logs not only for ‘obviously’ dodgy stuff, but also for Safeweb and the various other popular anonymous sites.
Moral of the story: spend any length of time at a website – whether legitimate, dodgy or just unusual (anonymisers, translation sites and so on) and you run the risk of your sys admin or an auditor coming to see you.