Block your search history and more

[eamon angelface]

This thing is great.

It's for Firefox and you can block everything that sucks about google and it protects you from them watching your search history.

http://www.customizegoogle.com/

[MSD]

nice one...too bad that I switched back to IE (IE7 Beta3 to be exact)... I used FF, opera and other major browsers...but FF was best out of the lot...but coz of some crashes, I lost it and switched to IE.

I hope IE launches such cool add-on as well

[eamon angelface]

IE sucks man. I used to use Opera but the speed difference wasn't that great (do I care if the page loads .00001 secs faster?) so I switched to FF and got hooked because of the add ons. That one seem poigniant because of the AOL search query release last week but there's tonnes more. What's really great about that one is it blocks the PPC ads!

If you use outlook then Mozilla has Thunderbird which I also use and find it fantastic. Sunbird is the calender feature and it blows but just get rainlender for a calender anyway. Low RAM usage and it's right on your desktop with short cut keys to make it visible and invisible.

Your FF might have been crashing if you didn't allow it to update. Keep with the updates and outside of irregular third party plugins fudging it I've noticed only a few crashes ever.

[MSD]

IE sucks man. ...
Your FF might have been crashing if you didn't allow it to update. Keep with the updates and outside of irregular third party plugins fudging it I've noticed only a few crashes ever.

hmm agreed, am not really fond of IE...but IE7 Beta3 is def a step in right direction.

abt that update thingy...I always keep things up2date...that's the whole prob...crash started after the stuff was updated. Also after reinstallation...also other stuff started to happen, like loss of fav list...also tried to find it in the FF folder, but nope...it was gone...so got tired of that...will try the FF 2.0 once its out.

Opera had diff issue with me...specially on forums. For instance when I got a pm...the forum notifies but even after i read the pm...the new pm notifier was shown...also when I read the new posts in a section, it kept showing as new posts were there.
Updated, dumped cache...did some custom edits...but nothing helped...

so went back to IE (and this one works flawless till now...so am ok with it )

[eamon angelface]

That's cool.

I swore off Microsoft after having to reinstall the OS thanks to their lovely security dll's that cause more problems than they protect you from.

With the whole North American scare over IP's being logged and people surfin habits monitored I thought people might like that customize google thing.

I also forgot about this other thing I figured out before that hides your IP. It's really fun because google reads your IP and assigns you the geographic google for that IP. Right now I get Russian google. 10 minutes ago I had Korean google. With people getting more into tracing shit and thinking themselves clever its a good thing to have it all blocked and secure etc.

[thefelinepunk]

I have a question:

What exactly is so bad about them watching your search history? What exactly do you think they're gonna do with the information?

[MSD]

I have a question:

What exactly is so bad about them watching your search history? What exactly do you think they're gonna do with the information?

well as long as they do what they say they do with that info...I think it's ok then.

but it's the same with tracking cookies...A Web site generates a unique ID number for each visitor and store the ID number on each user's machine using a cookie file. This is way for a site to accurately count visitors, the site can track not only your purchases, but also the pages that you read, the ads that you click on, information you have given to the site in online forms, etc.

When you visit a web site your browser sends your cookie containing the ID value back to the server. The server then saves a record in the database that contains the time that you downloaded the page and the URL, along with your ID and checks (or resets) the expiration date.

There are certain (usually 3rd party) providers that can actually create cookies that are visible on multiple sites. Many web sites use 3rd party providers to serve ad banners and Cookies on their sites. They can also place small (1x1 pixels) GIF files on the site that allow [example] DoubleClick to load cookies on your machine. These tracking servers can then monitor your movements across multiple sites.
Well that depends on if you understand how things really work. These 3rd party Cookies are generated by companies that get paid to obtain as much information as possible about your/users viewing habits, preferences, computer settings, etc.

Now you multiply this times the amount of ads and Cookie prompts on the page supplied by 3rd parties. This doesn't take into account the other tricks they use such as web bugs - single pixel images, hidden hit counters, page trackers, and other undefined javascripts. Getting the idea?...and that's just on one page! Then you find an interesting link to another page and the process starts all over again...*sigh*

[thefelinepunk]

Oh, is that all.


I really do see what you're getting at. In all seriousness, though, unless you're reading the online copy of Mein Kompf (I spell that right? If not then you know for sure I'm not a Nazi...) or viewing child-on-animal pornography, you shouldn't really care all that much who's watching you do what online.

Personally I don't much care what information or how much of it people collect about me, unless it's personal stuff like my phone number, address, SSN, or any financially related stuff. I'm keeping someone employed, obviously... my reward is that I know they're probably working a completely mind-numbing job to get that money. If google really wants to know how much I troll forums and watch porn, more power to 'em.

I'm aware that by making these statements of indifference to my privacy I am slowly but surely empowering everyone to remove the right of privacy to all people, but I'm tired right now and very lazy and not in the mood to care about it all that much.

Is there some other reason why I should be bothered by it? It's a legitimate question, I'm not trying to be a smartass.

[MSD]

Oh, is that all.


I really do see what you're getting at. In all seriousness, though, unless you're reading the online copy of Mein Kompf (I spell that right? If not then you know for sure I'm not a Nazi...) or viewing child-on-animal pornography, you shouldn't really care all that much who's watching you do what online.

Personally I don't much care what information or how much of it people collect about me, unless it's personal stuff like my phone number, address, SSN, or any financially related stuff. I'm keeping someone employed, obviously... my reward is that I know they're probably working a completely mind-numbing job to get that money. If google really wants to know how much I troll forums and watch porn, more power to 'em.

I'm aware that by making these statements of indifference to my privacy I am slowly but surely empowering everyone to remove the right of privacy to all people, but I'm tired right now and very lazy and not in the mood to care about it all that much.

Is there some other reason why I should be bothered by it? It's a legitimate question, I'm not trying to be a smartass.

lol same here, i care less of them...I regularly clean my PC of this garbage.

And you're right it mostly for users who are doing illegal stuff, i think.
Other than that I've no idea what it's used for am sure there's some other way to use them as well...but I'm unaware of that...I'm not a know-it-all lol and don't worry, not offended by the question lol

[eamon angelface]

There's also the issue of the cookies being sent containing information about you. Say you log into your online bank account and the someone on a previous site has one of those java keylogger things. You can get a lot of info from the click throughs and all that. I'm not a computer expert or anything, I just read up on this stuff for fun. MSD could probably tell you how that stuff works better than I could. I believe Identity theft is a part of it too.

But those are pretty alarmist reasons. I only ever started hiding it before because I didn't like that I didn't know it was being tracked in the first place. My thinking was: if they weren't doing something bad with it the they would have told me they were doing it.

[Steampunk]

Use Cello. They'll never track shit.