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Ask HN: How do you block Persistent Identification Elements?

1 points by dhimes 18y ago

I'm rather embarrassed to admit this, but I just learned of the existence of PIEs a couple of hours ago. I checked my rig, and, yup, there's history information being kept on my computer. I did a rm -f on the #SharedObjects directory, and a chmod 555, but I was wondering: is there a better way to deal with it? (Also, basically just for my ego, am I the only one who didn't know about these things?)

olefoo 18y ago
Well, you can go into the flash settings (right click on a flash object) and turn them off... For those who don't know what he's talking about this site http://vlaurie.com/computers2/Articles/pie.htm http://vlaurie.com/computers2/Articles/pie.htm has a fairly straight forward writeup. And although they are a bit obscure, they are basically cookies. Turning off flash, or using noscript will take care of them.
- dhimes 18y ago
  Does that really turn them off? I have mine turned off, and I still had these files in my directory.
  - olefoo 18y ago
    You have flash turned off and it's still dropping files in your #SharedObjects directory?
    - dhimes 18y ago
      no: right-click on the flash movie, select "settings," then set "local storage" (third icon from the left on my setup) to "zero."
      - dhimes 18y ago
        update: with the control in flash apparently set to off, flash still creates directories and saves a file. This is some bad mojo.