Flash Cookies Gaining Steam

In my original post about LSO, I tried to give a brief update on what they were and how to block them. Since that time, their use has become more invasive, and Adobe's tool reached the point where it just doesn't work for day to day use.

I got very frustrated with the Settings Manager that Adobe provides. The key reasons are:

• It doesn't integrate with my browser (Firefox)
• It doesn't always save my preferences
• I have to go back to it and manage each site's data regularly

A couple of days ago, I just got fed up and went looking. At the time of my last post, there wasn't much out there to help manage this problem. Today, there is, so I wanted to share what I found.

First of all, if you want some general education on LSO and what they are for, please see this website.

Next, if you want to be proactive about keeping this data off of you computer, you need to be using Firefox along with the BetterPrivacy extension. If you aren't using Firefox yet, you should be. Not because it's faster, not because it's open source, or any of that jazz. Use it because it is flexible and extensible by the open source community. Without that capability, the ability to remove LSO data would probably not be possible at this time.

Home Media, Part 2 (Storage. No, firewall.)

For starters, I need more storage. My main office computer is a Mac Mini hooked up to a 20" flat screen. It's got an 80g drive which filled up last year sometime. At that point, I went with an external USB enclosure with a 500g drive. It was fairly cheap (thanks Newegg!) and allowed me to move my iTunes library off to another drive, which freed up my primary volume considerably.

At 500g, I had way more space then I needed. I decided to partition the drive in half and give Time Machine a try. It was incredibly simple and easy to setup. Just the way I like it! On top of that, I felt moderately better that I was backing up important documents, photos, and home video.

Anyway, back to the point. I need more storage. I would like to start moving my DVD collection online so that I can stream it downstairs to the PS3. I'm pretty lazy and this would save me some trips up the stairs. Furthermore, I get kind of tired of swapping disks in the PS3 from playing games to watching DVDs.

So, because I'm not only lazy, but also cheap, I started looking around at the spare equipment that I had stored up in the office. I just figured I'd repurpose some existing equipment and fire up Linux and Samba and be done with it. There are probably enough parts lying around to build about 3 pc's, but it's all pretty old stuff. I have 2 working pc's, one of which is a Windows gaming machine that powers down randomly. The other is my firewall which runs Debian at the moment.

The firewall it is. But, before I repurpose that box, I need a different firewall. (I know this is a long ways from storage, but bear with me) I decided to upgrade my wireless access point to be wireless access point/firewall. The excellent DD-WRT package made this very easy in addition to adding some nice QoS functionality that I wasn't using before. I won't go into all the details of how to do it, because I believe that it is documented well elsewhere. Definitely drop a comment if you have some questions about it. I can go into details of my setup in a future post.

Before I closed out the firewall project, I ran over to Shields Up to verify the firewall settings were sufficiently hiding me from portscans. Yep, all good! Everything comes back "stealth". Now... where was I?

Home Media, Part 1

I've been watching the home media craze from a distance. My friends are buying media servers and media extenders and networked TiVos and on and on. But, I just haven't jumped into it. I have been quite satisfied with my DirecTivo with a modded hard-drive for extra capacity. It's not HD. It's not networked. It is years old and it just keeps working. I have all the movie channels and I do the occasional RedBox. Life is simple.

Unfortunately, that doesn't last forever. Now, I'm itching to do something different. I have some growing storage needs on my home network. I've got a PS3 that I use to play me some Call of Duty with my 10 year old friend and some guy named A_Trillion_Ninjas. I've got a growing sensitivity to risk and how my data backup strategy is working out.

I've just got this growing laundry list of fun little projects that take about 5 times as long as they should. The more I thought about it, the more they all became related.

I thought I would share my adventures here. Maybe you can relate. Maybe you think I'm an idiot. It's all good...