Safari 4's Messy Trail 200
Signum Ignitum writes "Safari 4 comes with a slew of cool new features, but extensive data generation combined with poor cleanup make for a data trail that's a privacy nightmare. Hidden files with screenshots of your history, files that point back to Web pages you've visited and cleared from your history, and thousands of XML files that track the changes in the pages in your Top Sites can add up to gigabytes of information you didn't know was kept about you." Some of Safari's bloat is kept in quite obscure locations; it takes a fairly knowledgeable user to find it and clean it up. You can avoid some of the worst of it by disabling Top Sites.
Mac abstraction affects the non-savvy... (Score:5, Insightful)
beta software (Score:5, Insightful)
Keep in mind this is a beta, folks; if you're using it, you're presumably volunteering to help inform Apple about stuff like this. So in addition to letting everyone else know safari is doing this, it might be a good idea to let Apple know that it is unacceptable in a web browser. Presumably the company released the beta in order to solicit just this kind of information from its users; hopefully enough concern from users will lead them to take these "features" out of the final release candidate.
Re:beta software (Score:4, Insightful)
Please don't do this. This "unacceptable in a web browser" feature is fantastic, and if you still find it unacceptable, you can turn it off. I, personally, find it a very nice touch.
Re:Mac abstraction affects the non-savvy... (Score:3, Insightful)
We know this but this is one of the basics of "using a PC" that ALL users should be taught; every so often you empty your cache. How often varies on what you do with your PC. There's a difference between power users / admins and normal users as we all know. Normal users shouldn't need to learn lots of geeky stuff just to use their PC daily, but there's a basic skill set that they should be expected to know. This is one of them, along with defragging and anti-malware scans (if you're on Windows) updates etc. It's not much, just regular maintenance.
Of course, if that were to start happening PC stores would see a drop in frequency of repairs, the amount they could con out of customers for simple work or new PC sales because their 1 yr old PC is slow as hell and they think it's out-dated. Some companies like to charge for basic training too, so I'd guess there'd be plenty of people who would like to see that idea shot down in flames. Nothing like screwing the people for maintaining your ticket on the gravy train huh?
Seriously though, a PC is a versatile tool, used in most places of work now. This means that most people will have to use PCs as part of their work, so basic PC maintenance should be part of the school curriculum. Note I said "PC" not "Microsoft Windows". We're talking platform agnostic here, giving the kids generic PC knowledge which they can apply to any platform, not indoctrination camps to create the next wave of Microsoft monkeys. In other words EDGI not wanted.
Re:Oh expoitable (Score:4, Insightful)
The real scary part of this for me is not the government, more on that in a sec, but your girlfriend/boyfriend/housemate. Anyone who feels like he/she wants to do some snooping now has a treasure chest of stuff to take out of context.
If you are seriously worried about those people snooping around in your computer like that, you have serious problems. You're supposed to be able to trust your girlfriend. If you can't, you may consider getting a new one, because she's going to cheat/breakup before long.
Can't always do as much for your housemate, but if you are seriously worried about them snooping around in your computer, you ought to password protect your computer. And get a lock for your bedroom.
Getting back to the government, most cases are not high profile law&order style procedural deals. I could easily see local lawyers taking porn sites as evidence you killed her, technology sites as evidence you were researching bombs, map sites that you were researching crimes, and I can see local judges allowing it, and local jury's believing it.
What exactly are you planning on doing that you will end up in such a situation? Judges typically don't allow evidence that is not directly related to the case, so if you're worried about being framed for killing your girlfriend with a pipebomb at a popular geocaching site I can see why you're worried, but most people don't have that problem. Oh, maybe this goes back to your weird housemate thing again?
Bullshit scaremongering. (Score:5, Insightful)
Use "Private Browsing" mode and this junk won't get in your history in the first place for you to need to delete it. The end. Meanwhile, fulltext searching of your history is hella convenient.
Re:Why would you use Safari anyway? (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's why I use and love Safari 4 on OS X. And yes, I am a huge geek who hacks code for a living.
For me, Safari provides the best web experience. For you, Firefox 3 is the sweet spot. Why can't you just accept that people have differing priorities and requirements, instead of smugly deriding others for using a "miserable little browser"? If you want to hate on a browser, hate on IE. At least there's demonstrable evidence of how IE has damaged the web. Us Safari users are doing just fine.
Re:At least it is not windows temp (Score:3, Insightful)
For internet settings (for IE at least), it's Options > delete offline content (exact location varies based on version). You get a warning about cache and cookies, you hit OK and it is gone. Deleted. ALL of the internet temp files.
To get of -all- temp files, just run disk cleanup. It will empty all standard temp directories. A program uses windows temp, disk cleanup removes it. None of this hiding BS, at least not in XP.
Dunno about Vista personally.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Okay, this is ridiculous. (Score:3, Insightful)
Everybody on here needs to grow up. You're whining and crying about your browser keeping a history of your browsing. That's been an accepted feature for over a decade. Only now, you've got a porn mode so it doesn't keep a history. That's new. Why are you wanking fools whining about a browser cache now? Are you seriously crying that a file on your computer might have a screenshot of where you've been on the web? Really? I've got a hint for you: NOBODY CARES ABOUT YOUR DONKEY PORN.
Don't bother responding, I've already answered your objections:
"Oh, but Geekboy, I live in a totalitarian regime, and I'm a freedom activist! They monitor everything I do!" Your browser history is the absolute last place the KGB is gonna look for information. They'll talk to your neighbors, your boss, your parents, and probably drag you in for interrogation before they even consider looking in your history.
"Oh, but Geekboy, I just love looking at little kids! It's not sexual at all, it just makes me happy!" Do like pedophiles have done since the middle ages: become a priest. Get it off the internet, those parents' groups and TV shows are really annoying. Also, same thing as in the KGB. Even if they don't catch you in an actual sting, they'll grab your stacks of CDs and piles of imported manga way before they give a rats ass about your browser.
Now mod me down, and prove you're all pathologically paranoid morons.
Re:Mac abstraction affects the non-savvy... (Score:3, Insightful)
Right, because clicking "Safari -> Empty Cache..." is amazingly complicated...
Er, did you RTFA? Or even TFS? Or even a few of the comments?
That's the PROBLEM! "Safari -> Empty Cache" doesn't empty potentialy hundreds of megs of data that Safari 4 generates. A normal user can handle an "Empty Cache" function, they can't handle digging through the browser's cache locations to manually delete the gigs of data built up because the "Empty Cache" function didn't do what it was supposed to do.
Re:Mac abstraction affects the non-savvy... (Score:3, Insightful)
erm putting all of a users private into ~ is pretty key, why safari is even allowed to write to files outside ~/ or /tmp/ is beyond me
Re:At least it is not windows temp (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is it that everyone's response to any sort of problem is "Windows is worse"? If someone described a serious flaw in say, a Prius, would your response be, "Yeah, but Honda sucks."
I'm not trying to excuse crappy design problems in Windows, but when is Apple going to lose this untouchable luster and take it's lumps along with everyone else?
Re:Safari does clean up after itself. (Score:5, Insightful)
You're not seriously considering Chrome over Safari for privacy reasons?
Re:beta software (Score:5, Insightful)
putting screenshots of websites you visit outside your home directory is a fantastic feature?
You're referring to an implementation detail, not a feature. The feature is the web page previews. Whether they are stored in /var or in ~/Library has no effect on the feature, but does affect the underlying implementation of it.
By all means, put the previews in the ~/Library folder. By all means, file a bug report about this detail, but don't request the removal the feature.
wow i sense the RDF is strong in this one
Correct, because as we all know, nothing bolsters a straw man like ad hominem.
Re:Mac abstraction affects the non-savvy... (Score:2, Insightful)
There are conflicting design considerations: Cached information in a user folder "unnecessarily" inflates the user folder, which is typically subject to frequent backups, often over the network. That's a lot of overhead for temp files. Shared caches can also improve the cache hit ratio. The obviously conflicting (and IMHO more important) goal is privacy, but it's not a simple "doh, how could they?" situation.
Re:Oh expoitable (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm not sure even Private Browsing works fully. Adobe stores a cache of all flash ads and components that are seen on sites that you visit.
So if you are browsing porn, (possibly even on Private Browsing mode... I'm not sure), even with resetting and clearing your history and cache, you can still get some idea of the websites visited by looking in the user's Library/Preferences/Macromedia/Flash Player/ folder and looking in the subfolders there (eg. follow through the #SharedObjects folder, and the macromedia.com folder and they have folders naming the sites visited in each).
Even when most people think they've cleaned up traces of where they've been, it's trivial on a Mac to get a list of sites that they've visited.
Re:Safari does clean up after itself. (Score:5, Insightful)
Jeeze, seriously, I didn't even RTFA but I noticed TFS said Safari 4 was generating potentially gigabytes of cached info, which it did -not- delete when you "cleaned" the cache.
Yeah, slashdot summaries are known for being highly accurate and reliable, and not at all sensationalistic. Of course, anything could potentially generate gigabytes of data. My text editor could do it if I had enough monkeys. But is the average Safari user's cache weighing in at several gigabytes? I don't think so. That was just put there to cause alarm for attention-getting reasons.
/var (Score:4, Insightful)
Call me a crotchity old unix head but I'm very happy that Apple is using /var for cache information and not /Users/username/Library/Caches.... in fact i think that whole directory should point to /var.
I'd love to be able to partition my /var stuff off like I do in Linux. So if Apple is moving in this direction and keeps it up, good.
Re:Advert co-incidence (Score:5, Insightful)
Not any more. If you're a good boy, you get to disable ads on /. while you're logged in. I now just get a little box saying "Ads disabled [tick] Thanks again for helping make Slashdot great!".
Dear Slashdot policy makers,
The feature introduced to allow active participants the option of disabling advertisements on the site has to be one of the most awesome things I've seen implemented re: ads on community driven sites.
Keep the great ideas coming.
Re:Mac abstraction affects the non-savvy... (Score:3, Insightful)
What about the porn mode, I mean the private browsing option?