PSA: Local Shared Object

[RoyGBiv]

Local Shared Object's (LSO) are not exactly a well-known among end-users. Companies with a web presence, however, know them well.

Cookies you have probably heard of. You visit a website. It sets a cookie for various things, sometimes to track your surfing behavior, to keep you "logged in" to a site, or to keep track of the last post you read on a web based forum. Some of you may even have taken measure to block cookies or limit their use so that only certain websites can set them, and you may have made sure that those cookies were deleted after each browsing session or at least some set period of time.

Cookies, according to some, are a potentially serious invasion of privacy.

Compared to standard cookies, however, LSO's make them look like the beacons of privacy protection. What is an LSO?

For all intents and purposes, it's a SuperCookie.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Shared_Object

If you've never manually deleted them or don't have some application in place that deals with them, you probably have LSO's on your system from day you first opened a web browser. They persist forever.

The wiki article tells you how you can manually deal with them. If you use Firefox, you can install the Better Privacy Extension and do so in a more automated fashion.

[Why Syzygy]

1. Ccleaner gets them

Applications tab > Adobe Flash Player.

[RoyGBiv]

2. Certainly ...

I wonder, though, how many people run such an application each time they run a web browser.

[Why Syzygy]

3. I would guess

quite a few never run any type of cleaner. I run it every time I shut down the browser.

[RoyGBiv]

5. Sad, really ...

... that one has to run applications after other applications of shut down in order to prevent still other applications from doing things we don't want them to do.

[Why Syzygy]

8. I neglected to mention

in the Opera thread.. But this release of Opera marks the first time I don't have to end process on browsers after I close them. I want it shut down because I run Ccleaner right away, and then launch .the.game. Really annoying having to end process on something that's been 'x'd' out.

[hunter]

9. I'd noticed that too.

Something was amok in whatever wrapper Opera was using around the plugins.

I'm not all that fond of things moving on my screen unless I make them move so I'd most often run with the plugins off.

[Why Syzygy]

10. It was a problem in Firefox too. nt

[charlie]

4. There are also DOM Storage objects

that have been implemented in Firefox since 2.0 and Webkit-based browsers such as Safari and presumably, Chrome. They're part of the W3C's HTML5 spec. Since that's a work in progress, much of their implementation is unspecified and up to the browser's vendor. Currently, they follow the same-origin rule cookies do, but that of course is still subject to abuse (remember web bugs?), with tracking data more rich and granular, since it isn't restricted to the parsimonious limits of cookies. And there's also the problem of communal sites like MySpace, where a DOM Storage object set by one can be read by all.

Fortunately, it's easy to disable in Firefox -- about:config --> dom.storage.enabled

[hobbit709]

6. And the aptly named Flash .SOL files.

[RoyGBiv]

7. Heh ... yeah ...

Either no one bothered to consult marketing on that, or they did, and it was left that way on purpose ... as a warning. :)

[wakemeupwhenitsover]

11. Dumb question from the clueless:

I run ccleaner several times a day, but I rarely close the browser. Is that important? Meaning, am I not doing any good by not closing the browser? I do have the latest version of ccleaner.

TIA.

[RoyGBiv]

12. Not really ...

If you run something to delete them while the browser is still open, you'll delete the ones that are there.

As long as you're still browsing the web, you'll collect more of them as you go.

It's not really a matter of needing to close the browser before you do this, just that the things gather like leaves while you're wandering around the web.

I'm not sure how CCleaner handles this operation. I would suggest going into the folder where the little buggers are kept and make sure that not just the LSOs but the directories they are in are deleted as well. (If CCleaner is deleting them, you wouldn't have to do it again.) I'd do it, but I don't have my Windows box booted at the moment and am doing something too memory intensive to fire up the virtual box right now.

One of the things that annoys me about these things is that they create directories named after the websites from which the LSO came. It defeats the entire point of so-called private browsing. Say you're here on DU and have the advertisements turned on. Google has a spasm a throws a flash-based add for thenastiestpronwebsiteyouveeverseeninyourentirelife.foo up there. For now and forever, unless it's deleted some other way, you've got a directory on your hard drive named www.thenastiestpronwebsiteyouveeverseeninyourentirelife.foo

[wakemeupwhenitsover]

13. I got all lost in there.

I thought that the point of ccleaner is that it deletes it permanently so there's no folder.

I am soo hopeless.

[RoyGBiv]

14. It probably does ...

I just don't know that it does.

I'm anally retentive about checking stuff like that.

[Why Syzygy]

15. Actually ..

Ccleaner gives a warning that it will NOT clean if the browser is still open. That's what clued me into the fact that Firefox was not ending its own process. I would 'X' out and start Ccleaner. It rounds them up, but notifies that they will not be deleted while the browser is running.

[RoyGBiv]

16. Ah, good to know ...

I had that thought, and did go to the extent of seeing whether LSOs get system locked, but they don't.

[wakemeupwhenitsover]

17. Someone told me that the new version of ccleaner

works even if the browser is still open, but I am hopelessly clueless. I know that I used to see a warning, but don't any more. Or, maybe I turned off the warning. :eyes:

Thanks for the info. I'll at close the browser once a day.

[Why Syzygy]

18. I didn't realize there was an update.

I'll update tonight. Thanks for that! :hi: It could be they have made that change.

edit: Yep. It works even with the browser open. New summary. Not used to seeing that.