On Bootup: First Impressions

So fellow editor Anthony sends me this VMware image and asks me to write a review about this OS given our shared fascination about it and his lack of time to write one himself (and I humbly accepted ). I fired it up after writing a .vmx configuration file to go with it, logged in using an anonymous Google account and was immediately greeted by this:

Welcome to Chrome OS.

But wait, let’s rewind a second here: before I reached the “omg your security is at risk – run for your life!” Chrome OS greeting page, I had to log in and remotely authenticate to Google using a Google account. So right away, Google receives my IP and subsequent location information upon computer bootup/login.

(refer to another article here, which criticizes Chrome OS for being too big brother-ish)

Of course, if you wanted to badly enough, you could root the system yourself by mounting it’s disk elsewhere and forcing all networking to go through a proxy system such as Tor for the ultimate privacy, but that would also make the system slow as hell and is too difficult for most users. You win, Google: here’s my location and the typical time of day that I boot up/log in to my computer running Chrome OS.

Chrome OS Settings

Moving past the “holy shit” tabs, I proceeded to open my own and start using the OS:

Well, go on, start being amazed already!

I found the menus to appear kind of Windows 98-ish what with the gray color next to all the shiny chromeyness and all, but whatever, it’s still an alpha testing build and probably can be skinned to hell and back at the OS level too.

Note where that menu is, too: there are three little menu buttons (which are hard to click when the mouse moves way too fast) in the corner that allow a window into the OS settings. They allow you to turn on/off your NICs, view your battery life, and the typical help/about pages etc.

But one thing that it lacks: an off/shutdown button. Once you are booted up, there IS no turning off the computer without holding down the power button or pulling the battery out (both of which are bad for the filesystem). I guess this is considered a “feature” of Chrome OS. How revolutionary!

Incognito Browsing = Porn Time!

In the screenshot above, you may notice the “New Incognito window” button underneath the usual “New tab” and “New window” selections. So what does this do?

It opens up a new chrome browser window, only completely sandboxed from the browser history and cookie storage for an “off-the-map” browsing experience:

Incognito browsing welcome page. Note how specific it is about the smiley thing.

The first thing that came to my mind: “they’re actually catering to porn watchers.” Yes, that’s right: take your netbook running Chrome OS into the bathroom, fire up an incognito window, and when you come out two minutes later (or longer, depending on chrome’s speed) there will be no trace of your activities. Just be sure to close the incognito window, of course!

But in order to accomplish this, one needs plugins installed for Flash or Java to view videos on the Web:

Chrome OS Plugins: Flash and Java

In my tests, the builtin Flash plugin didn’t work due to excessive crashing:

Note the “flash crashed” and Linux path notice under the toolbar, and the incognito icon in the corner ( )

But, it worked fine in YouTube (a Google-owned subsidiary):

Spaghetti beats cheerleaders any day of the month.

So Google got in bed with Adobe for out-of-the-box Flash integration pretty early, it seems. But Java? No. Silverlight? Don’t even joke like that. Stand-alone (.mp4/.mpg/.ogv etc.) videos? Forget it: even Google video removes the downloads for videos in these file formats upon detecting the Chrome OS user agent.

The Chrome OS useragent, by the way, is the same as Chrome’s only with “CrOS” thrown in there to shown that it’s the operating system and not just the browser. Adjust your shitty browser sniffers accordingly.

Where’s the Applications Menu?

I find references to an “applications menu” and “desktop” all over, but can’t find one:

The WHAT?

If I can’t find the applications menu as an experienced user/programmer having looked all over the place, then how can they expect netbook-using housewife users to locate it? Or maybe it just isn’t implemented yet since this is still technically an Alpha release.

And closing all browser tabs, instead of dropping down to a “desktop”, simply turns the screen blue under the cursor for a few seconds before launching a new Chrome window, restoring the last URL you closed.

Builtin Advertisements

Ironically, I discovered this while trying to install the Adsweep plugin for Chrome OS to remove ads from pages since they were slowing down my 300MB RAM virtual machine. The DNS resolution (over NAT) was so slow that the download page timed out and I saw this:

Note the first link: paid-for ad?

They suggest another site for you, based on their top search results for the URL’s terms. And if the top result happens to be ad-funded, then guess what? So even WITH my Adsweep installed, if a page times out due to Chrome/Linux’s apparent shitty DNS resolution, I am suggested a paid link. Great.

Other Miscellaneous tid-bits

Other than these issues, I overall enjoy the OS as a whole, even though I’m no Google fan (too big-brother-ish for me). I have always thought the idea of the web as a platform and a computer that could boot straight into a browser seemed like a great idea with the great proliferation of web apps in recent years, and Google delivered.

And Chrome couldn’t be a better browser to put on top of it all, using Webkit for pristine rendering:

Chrome OS passes the Acid 3 test 100%

Overall I was pleased, and look forward to future builds when the project continues to improve and gets better nearing release. With that said, I leave you with a final screenshot to demonstrate Chrome’s window manager’s appearance:

Chrome OS “About” screen

You can find the image floating around the web, if you wish to try it yourself

Google Chrome OS Review: The Housewife’s OS originally appeared on The Coffee Desk on November 21, 2009.

Twitter’s Retweet (beta) feature: note the “ReTweet” link next to the reply link.

The “New Feature”

So, what happens if the little link in the above screenshot snippet is clicked? Well, if you are “lucky” enough to be testing this feature, you will see the following within your timeline:

(note the image instead of the letters “RT”. That’s the innovation here, apparently.)

Everyone else sees the usual “RT @[user]: [Tweet]” format, without the fancy shmancy image to go in place of the “RT” part.

Management Screen

One more official part of the new feature, however, is the “ReTweet management screen”:

See who re-stated what

Here, you can see who has ReTweeted what, who has retweeted you, and so on. This tool only supports the usage of the “official” RT link; old-style manual “RT”s are not tracked here in bit.ly-like fashion.

My Verdict

I’m being a dick about this new feature, I realize this, and here’s why:

Bet your Twitter web client doesn’t do THIS, huh? More screenshots: The Coffee Desk Twitpic

Twitter user @troynt pretty much ruined Twitter for me: his Firefox Greasemonkey script added “group” support before the Lists feature was added for all to use, it hides the stupid Twi-ter pronunciation ad box thing, it nests timeline replies (seen in the screenshot), it allows you to add “notes” about a user to this profile page, it allows you to automatically see new Tweets upon reaching the bottom of the timeline screen in the web client, it can embed images (e.g. Twitpic) and YouTube videos directly into the timeline under the corresponding tweet, it has auto-complete for @ notation, and it allows you to turn off pretty much any aspect of the site via a nice checkbox-system within it’s in-Twitter management console.

The biggest thing Twitter should adopt here, while remaining optional and customizable of course, are the nested replies, image/video embedding, and auto-completion. Until then, this script makes Twitter’s web client 100% more usable for me.

One thing the script doesn’t do that I would like to see in Twitter is auto-updating times: Facebook does this in their newsfeed: when a minute has passed, the “posted at …” is updated to reflect how much time has actually passed, not how much time has passed since the status/post was last loaded. Nothing grinds my gears like trying to figure out when a tweet occurred upon returning to my computer after 5 minutes of being away (simple math shouldn’t be necessary with Web 2.0)

So while this article started as a critical review of the new ReTweet feature within Twitter’s web client, it’s quickly turned into praise for the @troynt Greasemonkey script instead, since it pretty much makes Twitter 100% better and adds more features to make it actually worthwhile. Use Firefox, get the Greasemonkey add-on, and get the @troynt Greasemonkey script from userscripts.org – it will change your perspective about Twitter’s web client moreso than their useless ReTweet Feature.

Twitter’s (Beta) ReTweet Feature Review originally appeared on The Coffee Desk on November 17, 2009.

And it was fucking nasty.

I look at Google Wave as Google’s technological way of repeating the same experiment: take Docs, Orkut, Gmail, Wikipedia, and IM, stick them in a “blender”, and you get Google Wave. What follows are what conclusions I have drawn as a user/developer using Google Wave for the first time.

Article index:
First impressions
Wave Terminology
Issues
My verdict
Screenshots
Screencast

First impressions: What is a Wave?

When Anthony said he scored an invite from Twitter, I couldn’t wait to see what the buzz was about – Google Wave was still relatively unknown and unexplored territory to me at the time.

It still is, but it was before I used it, too.

As stated above, it is basically the retarded child of Gmail, Docs and Orkut with an editing interface that can only be described as somewhere between Wiki-style editing and instant messaging. It’s really hard to explain.

Fuck it, here’s a screenshot:

So do you see where it draws from Gmail and docs in its user interface? Even more Gmail-ish is the assignment of email(?) addresses to @googlewave.com, although I think those are reserved for waves/blips.

I also said it was like Orkut, Wikipedia and IM: everybody can edit any wave (unless there’s some “read-only” checkbox I haven’t seen yet), and like IM, the waves/blips are directed towards one or more people in a social-networking manner, instantaneously.

Here’s the creepy factor: you can see what people are typing before it is officially published. I found that to be a little weird. Goodbye, moments of typing “fuck you I’m not coming to work today and I’m hungover” before hitting backspace a few times and typing “I’m feeling under the weather” in a conversation to my boss. In a wave, this would get me fired.

Here’s where I freely edited the top blip in someone else’s wave:

Wave terminology

From what I’ve seen, nobody really knows what the hell is going on in Google Wave, much less what they call everything. But here are the basics: a wave is a thread of blips. A blip is a multimedia message, that is, a rich textual message containing multimedia (duh).

And, for the creation of these extravagant new evolutions in online collaboration, Google has designed the ultimate clickable GUI component to begin one of these innovative new “Waves”:

(sarcasm fully intended)

Oh, and all the cool wavers/surfers/hipsters/testers use “Google \/\/ave”(backslash-forward slash-backslash-forward slash-a-v-e) to refer to the product. You can see why I don’t.

Issues With Wave

Spam spam spam! I waltzed right up to someone else’s wave/blip and added my own line to it. I could have easily added a link or files as well, and with the handy-dandy Wave API freely available to use, spammers and hacked accounts could tune Wave into the biggest spamfest since Twitter.

And I know we’ve ripped on Google for vague privacy policies before here, but Google Wave’s privacy policy keeps mentioning “offline storage” as a permanent storage of all my retarded waves, including smiling bob up above.

Since could waves also contain emails, files (read: warez) and even untyped/unpublished “nah, I’d better not say that” content, the “stored for life” offline storage clauses within the privacy policy is a little disconcerting to say the least. I don’t like my drunken waves being stored in a nuke-proof underground safe somewhere.

For a Google product in “beta”/preview, it’s very stable. All the JavaScript seems to be bug-free, even in the obscure browsers I rigorously tested Wave in in an effort to find flaws. The keyboard shortcuts are the best I’ve ever seen in a web app: Google’s devs have clearly done their homework for the programming of this app.

My verdict

I almost don’t see the need for any of this besides as a toy that simplifies bouncing between other tools.

On the other hand, everyone thought Twitter was the biggest piece of crap on the web when it first came out, but now everyone uses it. Maybe the same will true for Wave: it could possibly revolutionalize how we collaborate online, and combined with Google’s Chrome OS could be the next generation of computing, placing Google in control of the entire process from the hardware up.

Or, it could become a (to the majority of users) unused tool like Google Docs. Only time will tell, but the invite system seems to indicate popularity like that of Gmail, so it could go big once released.

Random features and screenshots

The editing history timeline is pretty cool

A yes/no/maybe widget. Elementary school love letter deja vu.

Thread blip blip blip blip blip blip blip blip blip blip blip blip etc.

Well that’s all for now, no more ripping on Google Wave until they add more features. I hope I cleared things up for users trying to figure out what it is after reading so many vague and screenshot-less reviews on other sites. I would just like to know how this idea was conceived in the first place, personally.

Oh, and if you want an invite, hit us up on Twitter – we still have 20 as of this writing

Update: Screencast added

Thoughts On Google Wave: A Google Wave Review originally appeared on The Coffee Desk on November 3, 2009.

Oh, and we provide a tribute and archive of our own, too!

Skip to a particular section:
Tributes
Archives
Personal Notes

The Tributes

First, the tributes: these have been seen and collected from all around the Internet, paying homage to the loss of many poorly-made, if not historic, Geocities pages sure to be lost with the service’s closing:

• xkcd.com’s Geocities redesign – we are mirroring it here, just in case the “redesign” is lost in the future.
• WELCOME TO YOUR DOOM!!! – also mirrored in case of a future unavailability, this person almost perfectly represents every other Geocities page in existence.
• Another Perfect Geocities Tribute – a great read for any person reminiscent of Geocities, as well.
• The GIF Guy’s Website (image map-less mirror here) – this site, hosted on a bare IP, is the archive of the Geocities page of the guy who created the first famous “under construction” GIF. Source is here.
• Geocities “Under Construction” Animated GIFs Collection – a memory-intensive archive of almost every “under construction” animated GIF known to mankind!

Those are classic, I really enjoyed how they satirize the “poor” usage of HTML/frames/GIFs as the old Geocities sites used to. Of course, if you want to experience this same feeling on a modern website, just jump on over to MySpace where most profiles continue to do so only with some CSS thrown in the mix.

(or, read my complaint against MySpace – the same applies to Geocities, as well

The Archives

The main archivers of Geocities are The Archive Team and Archive.org, both of whom realize that the shutdown of Geocities could potentially be a loss of valuable information.

In addition to these (but certainly not outshining them), there are a few Geocities pages a few editors here have saved during private web browsing, mainly saved due to the fact that Geocities has been rumored to have been closing for some time. There are pretty off-the-wall, just to warn you:

• RKFS Linux Filesystem Tutorial – archive of a Geocities-hosted Linux filesystem driver tutorial.
• Cold Water Extraction Tutorial – a chemical procedure detailing how to extract a liver-harming chemical from certain medicines.

The 404 error in the right frame of the page is due to the missing ad page that Geocities began to stick into pages – disregard it.

Final Notes

While Geocities is regarded by most early Internet-goers as a collection of poorly constructed (yet always “under construction”), personal, random, and terrible excuses for websites, there are a few Geocities sites that actually contain useful information, as the various archiving teams set out to preserve in history.

If you were a heavy Internet user from 1994 – 2000 or beyond, then you may have just had a Geocities page as your first website, so don’t be so fast to ridicule those who did. As for the rest of us, a simple MySpace/Facebook/Twitter/$SOCIAL_MEDIA website will suffice in the absence of Geocities.

R.I.P. Geocities 1995 – 2009

Geocities Closes: Tributes, Parodies and Archives Spring Up originally appeared on The Coffee Desk on October 26, 2009.

And in most cases, especially after a little research on the product, I’m right.

The Teeth Whitening Thing

I see these everywhere:

I hate these teeth ads

…isn’t it hideous?

I automatically draw a negative opinion of the product, whatever it is, that’s being advertised here: the ugliness of the ad just makes my skin crawl, and on top of that, it’s everywhere I go.

A little research showed that many people including several credible sources are calling it a scam. All the more reason not to “buy into” over-advertising, and a very good reason why Anthony hasn’t put any ads on this website.

“Back To School” Ads (the ones that dance)

Yahoo! Mail has the tendency to attract horrible ads like its some kind of magnet or something. And these ads are by far the most annoying, with the dancing characters distracting me from reading my Email to no end.

I don’t have a screenshot, but I’m sure half the population has seen these annoying ads in one form or another: they’ve featured dancing skeletons, a dancing rave chick, and walking moms (“Obama Asks Moms To Go Back To School” etc.)

Another aggressive ad campaign that leads me to suspicions as to the advertised product. Even worse are the “GET YOUR DEGREE ONLINE NOW!” commercials, but the two are very on par with each other.

Evony

Nothing much to say as to how annoying these ads are. I know you’ve seen them yourself on every website, but here are a few in the Annoying Hall Of Fame:

One of many annoying Evony ads

NSFW, but shown in the sidebar anyway

The worst one

Here lieth a problem with ads: Most are displayed in the sidebar of the page, right? Well, when one is glancing at your screen (e.g. at work), the first thing they see is whatever is in the sidebar. So if one of these ads are in the sidebar, then guess what?

And as far as Evony’s ethics go, I found this out about the company: they steal images. In an excerpt from the image owner’s blog, this little tid-bit of information regarding an Evony ad was uncovered:

The Evony Ad (using the stolen pic)

The original image, which Evony stole

On top of that violation of ethics by Evony, there are multiple other critical points by other bloggers and news sites (such as the Guardian), many of which are being sued by Evony. These posts can be found here, here, and here.

So once again, the product behind the overly-aggressive and spammy ad campaign is a sham, with the Guardian claiming that they are linked to a Chinese World of Warcraft scam (goldmining). On top of that, the “queen” that half the ads coax you to come save doesn’t even exist, which they tell you after you register.

Other Miscellaneous Annoying Ads

Any ad by Network Solutions, Inc. is annoying to me. They all feature some double-meaning opening phrase and South Park-like talking heads that somehow end up talking up Network Solutions’ hosting and domain name service.

GoDaddy’s ads on their own website (as well as their attempts to get you to upgrade your package while purchasing) is equally annoying, and ironically out for the same goals as Network Solutions.

MagicJack overadvertises – just look at this:

And finally, the Snorg Tees ads are too racy to be placed into the sidebar of every web page I’ve been to. NSFW ads are just terrible, and Adblock Plus just doesn’t come on the browser we’re forced to use at our workstations at work.

On A Lighter Note…

We were joking about what an ad for The Coffee Desk would look like if we chose to follow the guidelines set by those ads above, and here’s what we came up with…

Tongue-in-cheek The Coffee Desk ad

Feel free to plaster it all over the Internet

The Most Annoying Ads On The Internet originally appeared on The Coffee Desk on August 30, 2009.

But now the search engine giant is radically changing their entire search engine, behind the scenes at least. And it’s not even labeled as “BETA” as Google products typically are for the first 5 years in production, either.

What’s New?

First, a side-by-side comparison:

The current Google

The New Google

…so nothing has really changed on the front page. Even a look at the client-side source code shows that nothing is really “new” there, so what gives?

Real-Time Search

Google is jumping on the bandwagon that even competitors like Bing and Cuil are joining: Real-Time Search, or what we’ve only seen half-assed attempts at.

Firstly, my personal opinion is this: Real-time search is a necessity, and one which Google has always had the ability to do yet never practiced (in fact, I find Google very slow to index and rank pages).

Bing! is “somewhat-realtime”, and Cuil comes very close while providing a very nice UI in their new interface revision. But Google just might trump all of them with their new version.

And the best part is, there’s no easy way to “try out” real-time search. Unless you’re a news website like us and have the power to post something then immediately search for the headlines and F5 (refresh) until you see your result, there’s no easy way to determine whether or not a search engine is “real-time”.

But Google is claiming to be this, and we are to be experiencing this “new phenomenon” whenever we search. I thought Google was already getting better at indexing pages faster in its regular search engine, but from what I’ve heard the new Google is to be much better at it.

All the fingers point at an attempt at Real-time search, but one thing’s for certain: The results are different.

Impact on SEO

This is going to sound like I have nothing to write here, but its the honest truth: there is no “Google V2” crawler/spider out there indexing pages especially for the new revision. Its just the same retrieval method, with no known algorithmic indexing updates.

In plain English: just keep up your current SEO practices, nothing is new in the way Google determines content-importance; just in the way and amount of time it takes to Pagerank a page and get on search result pages.

When does it go live?

I personally found no indication from Google as far as when the new engine is to go live. With Google’s practice of keeping stuff in “Beta” until kingdom come, there could be an implication that the sandbox is a sort of “pre-beta” for the new page.

So the results are different, the speed is better, and the indexing is the same. Just keep up your current SEO practices for the meantime, and keep an eye for more developments and innovations with the new, hopefully rapidly-approaching Google search.

Meet The New Google originally appeared on The Coffee Desk on August 26, 2009.

Those AOL trial-goers would drop dead if they saw the new project being led by MIT’s Aaron Zinman, titled “Personas” (alternatively “Personas Web” or “PersonasWeb“. Not sure which one it is, exactly).

What Is Personas?

The page aims to be a data-mining utility aimed at showing just how much the Internet knows about you.

Pulling information from a private(?) database of mined information presumably from crawled web pages, it categorizes all resulting information into labels including but not limited to “Sports”, “Online”, “Legal”, “Illegal”.

The web page is simply one static HTML web page, using extensive JavaScript and AJAX to make remote queries to the main servers where the information is processed. All they ask for is your first and last name, and the engine then dumps everything it knows about you back into the page via AJAX requests.

How Accurate Is It?

I tried my name (first and last), and it didn’t yield very much. Then again, I never put my full real name on the Internet in the first place, so I have little to worry about.

Individuals with a fairly heavy online presence, such as The Coffee Desk’s own Anthony Cargile, yield much more information. It even gets more interesting when individuals have duplicate names, such as in Anthony’s case and others with generic names.

But as far as how extensive its database is, I’ll be the first to tell you: it’s nowhere near Google-sized. In fact, it’s pretty limited.

Anthony’s name only brought up results from the very bottom of this website, and a firefighter award someone with the same won in the state of Texas. Nevermind the fact that he has two whole websites with his name plastered all over it, and a public Twitter bio.

Tips: try your own name, then those of celebrities and generics like “John Smith” to see the varying result set.

Should We Be Worried?

Fret not, fellow tin foil hat wearing friends – this project is nowhere near a useful datamining utility until it gets better crawlers or gains direct access to Google’s index.

Compared to other datamining tools like Google, Facebook and other social media searching, this site looks like nothing more than a small hobby, size-wise.

And from the looks of it, that description isn’t too far off. It is merely an experimental educational tool.

But be aware: if Persona’s hidden index continues to gain intelligence via more in-depth crawling and other enhancements, then this could spell trouble for those whom value privacy. It may already spell out trouble for people fitting such as description as it stands now.

The Internet Knows Everything: MIT PersonasWeb originally appeared on The Coffee Desk on August 24, 2009.

Twitter's Population in pie chart form

(now that we’re right-side-up again…)

I’ve complained about Twitter’s spam-to-human ratio many times before but it seems that since those posts, Twitter spam has only continued to spiral out of control.

Bot Spam

Not having a profile picture (or one appearing a little too revealing), and only one or two tweets consisting of “Come view my pics! (you have to register)” is a clear sign that the new follower is a spammer.

That, and spammy tweets originating from “API” (application programmer’s interface) rather than the web, txt (text messaging) or a well-known client is also a sign.

But do we block them? No, of course not. Unlike email spam, having a spammer follow you on Twitter is still a follower, so we rarely block them in favor of a higher follower number.

Promoters and Marketers

These guys bug me.

Before you say I’m being hypocritical, our Twitter account is used both personally as well as to inform followers of new posts. The marketers/promoters I’m talking about are trying to make money off Twitter by tweeting links to sites that I assume pay them or something.

They act like humans and look like humans, but in reality they are copy-paste human robots that rarely interact with those that follow them back (they follow random people in these hopes).

RSS to Twitter

We all have run across them – all’s quiet for a long time, then BAM! 100 incoming tweets from an RSS tool filling up your client at once.

It’s annoying as all get out. And they’re all links to a crappy blog or something, too.

Humans

The few, the proud, the outnumbered. These days, if you want to be taken for a human without any question, you’d better lock your account and make followers request to view your updates first.

This has several advantages – keeps down on stalkers (they’re out there), prevents a raunchy tweet (or two) from reaching employers’ eyes, and also lets you know who knows what you’re doing.

That and non-spammy tweets are a refreshing sight on Twitter these days, where humans are outnumbered by the legions of spammers and other unsolicited accounts.

Final Notes

It’s not that I don’t appreciate the art of marketing, but when it starts to invade social media like it has done to Twitter (with rape being a more appropriate term), then I have a problem with it.

And I’m sure I can’t be the only one who feels this way, either – let me know your opinion on the growing Twitter spam/promoter problem.

Twitter’s Population originally appeared on The Coffee Desk on August 19, 2009.

Adobe Flash has its own private storage within your computer which is inaccessible from any browser’s history deletion system – regardless of the browser being used. This post provides more information about said “Flash cookies“, how they’re used, and how to view/delete them.

What’s a “Flash Cookie”?

Just like regular cookies, its nothing more than a small piece of data stored within your web browser’s local hard drive storage directory that is used to store information about you between web pages.

Cookies by themselves are not privacy risks – they’re used to keep you logged in and to keep other similar sessions intact. It’s how they’re used (or abused) that makes them a privacy concern.

Flash cookies differ in that they’re stored differently than other cookies – instead of being placed into the browser’s cookie storage, they’re placed in a separate, (by default) browser-inaccessible location, which means that a cookie without an expiration date will remain there indefinitely.

The bad part is that they can be retrieved from any website, most notable cross-site advertisers, to “track” a user’s browsing habits and where they’ve been.

How To Delete Flash Cookies

Convinced that its time to delete them? Or even better, want to just view these cookies and experience a little deja vu?

Macromedia Adobe has a little utility on their website, called the “Flash Settings Manager“, which allows one to view and/or delete these cookies. It is accessible here.

You might find some interesting stuff in there, especially if on a shared computer.

Better Privacy Practices

If you use Mozilla Firefox as your web browser (and, for all practical purposes, why wouldn’t you?) then there’s an addon that lets you automate the deletion of Flash cookies with every browser shutdown.

It’s called BetterPrivacy, and is downloadable here.

What To Think of All This

We cover privacy and Macromedia Adobe products (typically in a bad light) frequently on this site, but really – Adobe isn’t evil. They just have a bad history of their products being used as such.

Now, Macromedia Adobe could have placed Flash cookies within the same directory as the other cookies a browser uses so they could be deleted without a trip to Macromedia Adobe’s website, but they didn’t.

And again, this wouldn’t be such a big deal if the cookies automatically deleted themselves rather than sitting there, waiting to be viewed by prying eyes (through the settings manager, no less) or if the cookies weren’t used by advertisers to track users’ online activity.

But they are, so be aware and delete your cookies. This isn’t about covering up what naughty sites you’ve been to, but it is a privacy issue that everyone should be aware of.

And, that said, I leave you with a humorous image relevant to this post .

The Cookie Monster deletes his cookies, too

Adobe Flash Cookies: Hidden Web History originally appeared on The Coffee Desk on August 14, 2009.

Here is a comparison of a few types of email, and what they say about you right off the bat. You know you’re guilty of the same thing – just imagine that you’ve read these off a resume or don’t know the person behind the address ahead of time.

Now, I realize that some of these summaries are not for everybody, but are for humorous purposes.

Everybody is guilty of drawing an immediate conclusion about someone they’ve contacted before upon seeing their email address. Don’t sit there and tell me you haven’t done this also – we all have, although we’re so used to seeing stuff like this that we try to downplay it a little more.

But you still have to admit that these are true most of the time, and I’ll be the first to admit to what I’ve thought in response to seeing an email address of a person I don’t know.

Thanks for reading.

What Your Email Address Says About You originally appeared on The Coffee Desk on August 8, 2009.