I believe any one using Portable Firefox on a Flash Drive is in danger of leaving private confidential data behind on the system drive after they have closed Firefox and safely removed the Flash.
This is a link on which ??? conceals personal identification of my specific family photo album.
http://www.photobox.co.uk/????????/album/??????????cid=tashare001
Photobox shows me the first page of snapshots in a photo album with 700+ snapshots when I use this link.
I launch Windows Explorer and aim at
C:\Documents and Settings\Dad\Application Data\Adobe\Flash Player\AssetCache
this holds today's random empty folder ...\6JKGEVYL
Switching back to Photobox - I click on Slideshow and Firefox is immediately busy with a black screen as it prepares to show 700+ photos,
and at the same instant ...\6JKGEVYL has received a massive
553 KB 1C04C61346A1FA3139A37D860ED92632AA13DECF.swz plus
148 B 1C04C61346A1FA3139A37D860ED92632AA13DECF.heu
I get the same results with all forms of Firefox,
i.e. non-portable Installed on C:\ Firefox 3.0.13 and 3.5.3
and also Portable extracted to H:\ Firefox 3.07 and 3.5.3
Photobox technical support have no idea why they dump this flash trash on me,
so I consider them guilty of broadcasting / publishing on C:\ my "shopping basket" of photos they wish to charge for, and even worse - any credit card numbers I might have allowed them to charge against in the past.
I loathe and detest Flash, and it is only present for my daughter whilst using NON-portable Firefox installed on C:\
Is it possible to totally remove all installed capability of Flash,
and to have two folders of Portable Firefox, one with a FLASH add-on extension, and one without ?
Regards
Alan
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Flash is not portable and can not be modified to be portable (at least not legally). Flash stores information in Locally Shared Objects (LSOs) also known as Flash cookies... sometimes known as Privacy Busters since browsers can't see or clear these cookies and the Private Browsing Modes ignore them. Even worse, they're shared between all browsers on a system, local or portable, Firefox, IE, Opera, Chrome, etc.
You can disable the flash plugin within Firefox from Tools - Add-Ons - Plugins. You can also install the FlashBlock extension to block Flash objects.
Generally, these objects contain information on specific games and things. I've never seen a company store credit card info in there (as it would be an exceedingly stupid thing to do).
An upcoming version of the platform will let you clean these up.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Thank you John.
Going to bed now, will be getting FlashBlock after breakfast tomorrow.
To protect people who think their Company I.T. department will never know if they put their own Flash Drive into a Company computer, it would be nice if Portable Firefox came with a warning to use Flashblock to stop data leakage.
I fully agree that it would be stupid for Photobox to put credit card information into flash trash, but since they cannot tell me anything about it they cannot refute that possibility ! !
Regards
Alan
Another option is to use the firefox add-on Better Privacy (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6623)
Devo
Mostly I am concerned less about privacy than about unwanted rubbish on my system.
Your link seems very promising for getting rid of any jumbo cookies that sneak in when I am not looking.
I also now realise, having just insured my house through a cash-back site that gives 40% cashback, that when I did this last year I followed instructions and deleted all tracking cookies so the insurance company would not mis-direct its commission to a previously used price comparison web-site. And this time I went better - not only got rid of "browser" tracking cookies, I also totally erased the contents of
%APPDATA%\Macromedia\Flash Player\ and
%APPDATA%\Adobe\Flash Player\
I am about to insure my car.
I will make sure I use your recommendation so I can stay ahead of the game.
NathanJ79 and ottosykora
Thanks for the information. It should be more widely known.
I have seen people in some forums who think they are safely getting away with it.
Perhaps they are being given enough rope to ensure they can hang themselves.
I personally have never been tempted to plug a Flash drive into a company computer :-
1. none of my company computers had a USB port ;
2. I never had a Flash Drive until some time after retirement.
Regards
Alan
That won't help.
See, when you first put a flash drive in a computer, doesn't matter which one, Windows identifies it and installs the drivers for it. This information can be retrieved from the Device Manager at any time during or after removal of the device.
If you're trying to sneak around on a work computer against the wishes of IT, you're fighting a losing battle. Not to preach, but it's best to operate within the rules. I am allowed to use the net, go wherever (though some sites are blocked), and I can't install stuff. So I use portable apps. If I were not allowed to, I wouldn't, because my job is too important, PortableApps.com apps are not meant to be stealthy at all, and I haven't got the means to cover my tracks effectively, so I would not try. But, that's just me.
is configured already for that particular device, e.g. when same make of device was used on that machine before, operating system will retrieve manufacturers code, class of device, serial number and similar things and will store that information for the time one comes and sticks the same device in the same port again so the driver does not need to be configured again. All that is logged in registry and can be retrieved in readable form with software like usbdev.
Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland