

Ask HN:  How do you block Persistent Identification Elements? - dhimes

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?)
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olefoo
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> 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.

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dhimes
Does that really turn them off? I have mine turned off, and I still had these
files in my directory.

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olefoo
You have flash turned off and it's still dropping files in your #SharedObjects
directory?

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dhimes
no: right-click on the flash movie, select "settings," then set "local
storage" (third icon from the left on my setup) to "zero."

~~~
dhimes
update: with the control in flash apparently set to off, flash still creates
directories and saves a file. This is some bad mojo.

