Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on December 30, 2009 by CyberNet.

Ever since consumers started gaining access to the internet, cookies have been controversial. They have a lot of legitimate uses, such as helping websites remember that you’re logged in. On the other hand, privacy campaigners have often voiced concerns about ad networks using cookies to gain information about your surfing habits. Although browsers will let you disable regular cookies completely if you want, this doesn’t keep sites from storing a more sophisticated type of cookies on your computer…

How is it possible that sites can still track you even if you’ve disabled cookies? The answer lies within a browser plugin that is installed on approximately 99.0% of Internet-enabled computers worldwide: Flash. In version 6 of the popular plugin, something called Local Shared Objects was introduced. This allows websites to store a small amount of data on your computer. But hey, wait a minute… that sounds an awful lot like the concept of cookies.

There are three major reasons why we should be cautious with Flash cookies:

• By default, every website is allowed to use up to 100kB of storage on your computer. Regular cookies are limited to 4kB. That may not sound like a lot of space these days, but that’s huge in cookie terms.
• Flash cookies never expire, unlike regular cookies.
• Even when you opt out of cookies entirely in your browser’s preferences, Flash cookies can still be set unless you disable Flash entirely.

Calm down
Don’t panic. Flash cookies don’t will not send your social security number to criminals or anything like that, but it is important that you understand what they could be used for to make an informed decision about them.

Let’s have a closer look at a common “evil” use of cookies in general: marketing. Sites A, B and C display ads from ad network X on their site. If you go to site A for example, the ad network can place a cookie on your computer that contains the URL you just visited. As you go from site to site, perhaps including site B and C, the network can collect the URLs that display their advertising to generate an anonymous profile about you, containing such information as your interests, political orientation, beliefs, age and the region where you live.

So basically Flash cookies do what regular cookies do too, except that Flash cookies can contain more data and never expire. If that doesn’t sound bad to you, Flash cookies are nothing to worry about.

Finding your Flash cookies
To help us find and delete Flash cookies, we’re gonna need a Firefox add-on called BetterPrivacy. After installing it, you can start it by going to Tools > BetterPrivacy. If you take a look at the screenshot, you can see that I’ve been playing a Flash game called Level Up and that I have been using Gmail’s web interface. All entries that begin with a hash are harmless because they’re related to Flash’s preferences.

There are two entries that caught my eye: cnettv.cnet.com and vizu.com. CNET TV appears to have stored data in a file called OVPMetricsProvider.sol, which leads me to believe this cookie is used solely to do detailed site analytics. I didn’t remember going to Vizu.com, so I looked it up. A quick search revealed that it is an analytics company, therefore people who are concerned about their privacy probably don’t want this cookie around.

Deleting Flash cookies
Unfortunately, BetterPrivacy can’t block Flash cookies as of yet. You can however let it delete your Flash cookies on demand with a hotkey or automatically every couple of hours. I’m not too paranoid about my privacy, so I went with the less radical solution of having BetterPrivacy delete my Flash cookies when quitting Firefox. All these options can be accessed on the second tab of the add-on’s preferences window.

Much like regular cookies, Flash cookies also have legitimate uses you don’t want to block. After all, you don’t want to lose your progress in that Flash game you’ve nearly finished. Luckily you can whitelist certain Flash LSOs so that BetterPrivacy won’t delete them. This can be done by going to the first tab of the settings window, selecting an entry and clicking the ‘Prevent automatic LSO deletion’ button.

The tips in this article only cover Firefox. If you have Opera/Chrome/IE/Safari tips that fit in with the article, please do share them with us in the comments.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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In April, Texas Instruments announced its intention to snatch up National Semiconductor for a cool $6.5 billion. Now, almost six months later, the acquisition is complete and TI can tack another few percentage points on to its already market-leading chunk of the analog chip market. At least for now, National will operate as a branch of TI’s analog division, which now accounts for over 50-percent of the company’s revenue, and keep its (reasonably) well known brand name alive. For a few more details on the deal, check out the PR after the break.

Continue reading Texas Instruments wraps up purchase of National Semiconductor

Texas Instruments wraps up purchase of National Semiconductor originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 25 Sep 2011 00:49:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on June 25, 2007 by CyberNet.

IE7Pro is the single biggest browser add-on that I’ve ever seen. We’ve previously outlined some of the features that it enhances Internet Explorer 7 with, but we thought that it was time to take another look at it. Heck, in the last 5-months it has received 7 updates, and almost every update adds at least one new feature.

Looking through the changelog these are the things that stood out to me the most:

• Support for Internet Explorer 6
• Greasemonkey script support, with several popular ones included such as the YouTube video downloader.
• IE7Pro can update itself with just one-click.
• Autofill function
• Improved plug-in support: IE7Pro includes weather, Alexa/PageRank, and site information plug-ins by default. All of those display in the Statusbar as shown in the screenshot below.

And then there is the biggest feature which was just added at the beginning of June: inline spell checking! Just like in Firefox 2 you can have Internet Explorer 7 check the words you type for misspellings. If it finds that you spelled a word incorrectly it will be underlined in red:

The latest version of IE7Pro added spell checker support to both Gmail and Yahoo Mail as well, which is probably the two most popular locations where people would want it. You can even add additional dictionaries to make spell checking in other languages a piece of cake.

I don’t use Internet Explorer very often, but if I did there is no way that I would use it without IE7Pro installed. It adds a lot of functionality that I feel is necessary for Web browsers to have these days, although it does still lack session restoring. I guess IE7 does have session restore capabilities built-in, but it only pops up when you go to close the browser with multiple tabs open:

Thanks to Dark Shroud for pointing out the IE7Pro spell check update in the comments.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Spain — the land of pasión, jamón ibérico and flamenco is throwing a stylish solución towards the medical community’s way. Researchers at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid have created an intelligent eT-shirt (looks more like a tank top to us) for biomonitoring of hospital patients. The wearable, washable chaleco is embedded with electrodes that monitor its wearer’s vitals, and a removable thermometer and accelerometer for the collection of temperature and positioning data. A separate in-pocket GPS dongle is also used to locate individuals “within a two-meter margin of error,” but the team plans to incorporate this localizer directly into the shirt in future iterations. Tested at the Cardiology unit of Madrid’s Hospital Universitario La Paz, the collaborative LOBIN (Locating & Biomonitoring by means of Wireless Networks in Hospitals) project prototype could help reduce in-patient stays, delivering SMS alerts to off-site, connected medical staffs. No word on whether this’ll be offered in S, M, L or XL, but hey, at least that black is slimming. ¿Hablas español? Pues, skip past the break for a video tour of the form-fitting device.

Continue reading eT-shirt from España looks after your heart, minds its bedside manners (video)

eT-shirt from España looks after your heart, minds its bedside manners (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 24 Sep 2011 21:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on September 25, 2007 by CyberNet.

After about a month in progress, we have finally launched a huge Learn Firefox redesign! Our focus was to bring a graphical appeal to the site since it is a “visual guide to the Firefox web browser,” and we believe that we’ve successfully done that.

For those of you who haven’t visited Learn Firefox yet there has never been a better time. Almost 100 Firefox extensions have been reviewed thus far, and screenshots of over 200 themes have been taken. Of course, at the center of all this are the countless guides that have been created to help new Firefox users learn the ropes.

Here’s a list of what’s new:

• New design with simplicity in mind
• Significant speed improvements
• Works great in all the popular browsers
• Each category has the posts broken up into “Guides” and “Extensions.”
• Mini navigation buttons are located on the bottom of every page (except for the homepage for obvious reasons)

We would like to welcome you to the new Learn Firefox! This is quickly becoming a hub for new and existing Firefox users alike, and you can always subscribe to the feed to stay up-to-date with the latest articles. The next time you know someone switching to Firefox, point them in our direction so that we can help them along!

Note: We’re still in the process of updating some of the graphics on this blog, but that should be done shortly.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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