Gl.ib.ly

Flash apps have cookies and they don't disappear when you clear your browser cookies. In the terminal type the following:

ls ~/Library/Preferences/Macromedia/Flash\ Player/#SharedObjects/*/

Surprised? You'll probably see a long list of sites you haven't visited anytime recently. To remove these creepy cookies do a:

rm -r ~/Library/Preferences/Macromedia/Flash\ Player/#SharedObjects/*/

The paranoid among you might want to create a script with a line like the following in there:

find ~/Library/Preferences/Macromedia/Flash\ Player/#SharedObjects/*/ -type d -mtime +7 -exec rm -r {} \;

This can be added to your daily cron task and will delete any cookie directories older than 7 days.

Rant warning.

Now this is very spooky. A while back, about a year ago, I was asked to look into a fraud case on behalf of someone I know. How surprised was I to see one of the players in my FaceBook suggestion box.

I would, never, ever, dream of letting a service like Facebook have access to my mail account to enumerate possible friends. Are you nuts? Would you give me your email address and password? No you wouldn't. You wouldn't do it because I might invade your privacy. I might do bad things like publish embarrassing emails, send emails to your boss, and generally make your life a living nightmare for a short while. Yet, some people let Facebook into their email accounts willy-nilly!!!

I hear you, my email account my business. Well, no. An email I send you is half my business. You are the intended recipient. I understand that you can forward it on, print it, any number of things I might not like. But at least I can hold you responsible. So if you appear in friends list with no clear relationship vector I am coming for you. The rest of you cop-on.