How to disable or remove completely Adobe
(Macromedia) Flash Cookies on Linux
As I've mentioned in my previous post, one of the
greatest
"evils" which prevents a good internet anonymization whether you
surf online is Adobe Flash Player
There are two approaches you might partake to disable the privacy
issues which might be related to Adobe Flash cookies saving data
about flash banners or websites which stores their cookies to your
computer.
To find out if flash websites has already saved their nasty flash
cookies on your Linux, issue the commands:
hipo@debian:~$ cd .macromedia
hipo@debian:/home/hipo/.macromedia$ find -iname '*.sol'
./Flash_Player/macromedia.com/support/flashplayer/sys/#s.ytimg.com/settings.sol
./Flash_Player/macromedia.com/support/flashplayer/sys/settings.sol
./Flash_Player/macromedia.com/support/flashplayer/sys/#ip-check.info/settings.sol
The returned output of the above find command clearly reveals the
shitty flash has stored already 3 flash cookies on my Linux, 3
cookies which later can be easily requested by other flash
banners.
The 3 flash cookies are:
1. Saved by Adobe's Flash Configuration Manager
2. Saved by the website ip-check.info
3. Saved by s.ytimg.com's website
Now to deal with the situation and get rid of flash cookies, there
are possibly two ways of approach that one can take:
1. One is to
use some
kind of script like the one clear_flash.tsch the other one is
to completely disable flash cookies.
Using the clear_flash_cookies.tcsh does get rid of flash cookie
problems just temporary as it might be set to be executed either
once the browser is starting up, or directly via some kind of cronb
job entry like:
01 11,19 * * *
/home/hipo/scripts/clear_flash_cookies.tcsh
e However clearing up (removing) the flash cookies, still doesn't
completely proihibit saving up of flash cookies and in the time
intervals between the clear ups of the flash cookies, still some
websites might save information related to their use on your Linux
host and expose this information for other external flash websites
to read and retrieve information about your previous websites
visits.
Therefore it might be a better solution in terms of browser
security to;
2.
completely disable the use of adobe flash cookies on your
Linux powered desktop.
Disabling adobe flash cookies is possible by either using the
online flash Global Storage Settings (Flash Settings
Manager) by navigating to the URL:
http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager03.html
And by removing the tick which is present to the option:
Allow third party Flash content to store data on your
computer
Or by linking the local directory
~/.macromedia ->
/dev/null
hipo@debian:~$ mv .macromedia .macromedia-bak
hipo@debian:~$ ln -s /dev/null .macromedia
hipo@debian:~$ ls -ald .macromedia
lrwxrwxrwx 1 hipo hipo 9 2009-03-30 09:56 .macromedia ->
/dev/null
That's all, Farewell nasty Flash cookies!