A new privacy and log scrubber for KDE4, Firefox, & Flash

[Snowhog]

Re: A new privacy and log scrubber for KDE4, Firefox, & Flash

If you still believe it was kscrubber that removed these, or if you're talking about a different browser, then let me know and we can try to track that down. Thanks for contributing.

Not Firefox. Konqueror. Most of my URL icons are returning - just looked at them, and the majority of them have 'returned' this evening.

Thank you for the good work.

[IgnorantGuru]

Re: A new privacy and log scrubber for KDE4, Firefox, & Flash

Not Firefox. Konqueror. Most of my URL icons are returning - just looked at them, and the majority of them have 'returned' this evening.

I see. Clearing that icon cache may be a necessary side effect of clearing Konqueror's site history. I'll look into it a bit more when I'm on my KDE system. I notice the other cleaners clean out those icons, so there's probably good cause to do so. Perhaps Konqueror doesn't separate the bookmark icons from other visited site icons.

At any rate, if that bothers you, then you may want to customize your copy of kscrubber, which is encouraged. It's probably one of these two lines, or both, that is doing it:

wipe "/var/tmp/kdecache-$user/favicons/*"
wipe "$userhome/$kde/share/apps/konqueror/faviconrc*"

You can put a # at the start of those lines to disable them. Just be advised that this change may leave visited-site info behind.

[IgnorantGuru]

Re: A new privacy and log scrubber for KDE4, Firefox, & Flash

Re the konqueror icons being deleted, I looked into this a bit more and konqueror does indeed store both bookmarked and non-bookmarked icons in /var/tmp/kdecache-USER/favicons/. As a solution I have made kscrubber a bit smarter in this area - it will now examine the bookmarks and only delete non-bookmarked icons. This appears to solve the issue.

Note that these icons are also cached in /var/tmp/kdecache-USER/kpc/. However, kscrubber will only clear that cache if KDE is not running (you run it from a shell prior to logging into KDE). This is due to instability issues when kpc's cache is deleted while KDE is running. Thus to completely remove the history of visited sites produced by Konqueror, you must run kscrubber prior to logging into KDE. (In which case the updated version will delete all of /var/tmp/kdecache-USER/, EXCEPT favicons/, which it later deletes selectively based on the bookmarks you have.)

Let me know if that doesn't solve the issue. If there are any further issues with those icons, it may be due to the poor cache invalidation in KDE. As they have ignored my bug reports on this, there isn't much else that can be done. Namely, if Konqueror looks to the kpc cache for its icon, and the cache says its there even though it isn't, then it may not get the icon it wants, even if that icon is present in favicons. However, in my minimal tests with it, the way kscrubber now handles it seemed to avoid this problem.

Thats the short answer. It's really messy the way Konqueror handles its icons - a nightmare from a security perspective.

Long story short, kscrubber 1.2.5 and later should leave the Konqueror bookmark icons intact.

[Snowhog]

Re: A new privacy and log scrubber for KDE4, Firefox, & Flash

Long story short, kscrubber 1.2.5 and later should leave the Konqueror bookmark icons intact.

Cool. I'll download the 'lastest/greatest' kscrubber and give it a go and let you know.

[Snowhog]

Re: A new privacy and log scrubber for KDE4, Firefox, & Flash

Just gave it a go. Works like a champ. Ctrl-Alt-F1 at the KDM login screen, login in, become root (sudo su -) and run kscrubber. When it finished, exit as root, Ctrl-Alt-F7 and login via KDM. Fired up Konqueror and checked my bookmarks. All the icons were intact!

Thank you.

[IgnorantGuru]

Re: A new privacy and log scrubber for KDE4, Firefox, & Flash

@Snowhog
Thanks for letting me know.

I also want to drop a link here for my new sandfox. This is a very easy-to-use and secure way to limit what files and folders Firefox and other apps can access on your system. By limiting Firefox, you also limit Java, Flash, and 3rd party plugins as well - they only see a limited version of your filesystem. This is a nice complement to kscrubber, and also provides another method for dealing with flash cookies.

As an aside, notice how in order for Firefox to use KDE themes inside the sandbox, the kdeglobals file must be included. Yet this is the same file that KDE stores recent activity information in - an example of how KDE's use of kdeglobals for this purpose undermines privacy. (By default, sandfox includes kdeglobals in Firefox's sandbox, but you can remove it from the profile if you prefer. You'll probably lose the ability to have your KDE theme inside Firefox though.)
http://igurublog.wordpress.com/downl...cript-sandfox/

A number of people, myself included, have been using Sandfox and it has been very reliable. In fact in the relatively short time it has been available, it has already been downloaded almost as many times as kscrubber (the #1 download), which has been there for months. To me this shows that sandboxing is gaining interest. I think it's an excellent way to reduce vulnerability to net exploits.

[Qqmike]

Re: A new privacy and log scrubber for KDE4, Firefox, & Flash

Happily using kscrubber to keep things cleaned up in Kubuntu (8.04.3 for now).

Just noticing two things, the one re Konqueror we've already discussed (above), but cleaning seems to be done OK:

Warning: /tmp/kde-root/ksycoca is not a regular file, rename/unlink only!

WARNING: konqueror is running - cannot clean thoroughly


Hope you can keep up with kscrubber, though I know you've gone off KDE (w/ARCH).
kscrubber is the best thing out there right now for cleaning Kubuntu.
I realize maintaining these things takes a lot of work, and KDE seems to present new changes/challenges. Of course, we do have your script! While I don't understand much of it, it would be possible to copy out the obvious, straight cleaning statements and make a reduced cleaner.


Many thanks again for making this available to Kubuntu!

[IgnorantGuru]

Re: A new privacy and log scrubber for KDE4, Firefox, & Flash

Warning: /tmp/kde-root/ksycoca is not a regular file, rename/unlink only!

IOW srm does not follow links, it merely removes the link. Not sure why you have a link in there, but KDE4 uses /var/tmp/kdecache-*/ksycoca4 so I can't check it.

WARNING: konqueror is running - cannot clean thoroughly

Running instances may prevent configuration files from being cleaned, in that they are written again when the program closes. But if it's just a preloaded instance of Konqueror that may not apply.

Hope you can keep up with kscrubber, though I know you've gone off KDE (w/ARCH).
kscrubber is the best thing out there right now for cleaning Kubuntu.
I realize maintaining these things takes a lot of work, and KDE seems to present new changes/challenges. Of course, we do have your script! While I don't understand much of it, it would be possible to copy out the obvious, straight cleaning statements and make a reduced cleaner.

I intend to keep it up to date with anything I'm aware of, or am made aware of. I'm using some KDE 4.4 apps now in Arch, though not the full desktop, so especially with KDE 4.4 and later you may want to check the cleaning. It's good to customize it by adding your own wipe and edit lines - this was always the intention as everyone's cleaning requirements and apps are different. You don't need to mess with most of the script - just use the existing lines as examples to copy from.

Thanks for your feedback.

[Qqmike]

Re: A new privacy and log scrubber for KDE4, Firefox, & Flash

Thanks.

[IgnorantGuru]

Re: A new privacy and log scrubber for KDE4, Firefox, & Flash

I might add that I am so horrified with the KDE 4.4 updates which I finally got to work this morning that I am in the process of removing all KDE apps from my system. Akonadi is now required and integrated into kmail and other apps as of KDE 4.4, virtuoso has been added to soprano - yet another background server running, Nepomuk started indexing despite the fact that I don't have strigi installed, and other changes. All this just to run kmail? Ridiculous. KDE has truly becomes a Windows-like nightmare and I am ditching it completely. Claws seems like a good replacement for kmail. I'm going to miss Krusader, but it's worth missing.

I recommend sticking with KDE3 as long as you can, and ultimately moving away from KDE. I will probably be dropping kscrubber as a result of this - I'll leave it for download but won't maintain it further. It's a good cleaner approach, though, so I recommend using it as a skeleton for building custom cleaners.

[skunk]

Re: A new privacy and log scrubber for KDE4, Firefox, & Flash

I might add that I am so horrified with the KDE 4.4 updates which I finally got to work this morning that I am in the process of removing all KDE apps from my system. Akonadi is now required and integrated into kmail and other apps as of KDE 4.4, virtuoso has been added to soprano - yet another background server running, Nepomuk started indexing despite the fact that I don't have strigi installed, and other changes. All this just to run kmail? Ridiculous. KDE has truly becomes a Windows-like nightmare and I am ditching it completely. Claws seems like a good replacement for kmail. I'm going to miss Krusader, but it's worth missing.

+1

[Qqmike]

Re: A new privacy and log scrubber for KDE4, Firefox, & Flash

Well ... I'm using 8.04.3, a fact which should summarize my thoughts on this. I can think of no good reason for me to use KDE4+, many reasons not to, and I can think of every good reason for me to stick with 8.04.3/KDE3.

[IgnorantGuru]

Re: A new privacy and log scrubber for KDE4, Firefox, & Flash

Well, it's been awhile. Just wanted to note that I have updated kscrubber to version 1.2.7. This corrects a very old bug which interfered with correct folder globbing in the wipe function. This only affected removal of some Firefox files which generally should already have been removed by cleaning in Firefox, which is why I didn't notice the bug until now. Still, it would be best to update your copy of the script.

Also, I have disabled the --killindex option, as it is no longer advisable with newer versions of KDE4. If you really want it (for KDE versions 4.3 and prior perhaps), it can be easily re-enabled in the script.

Finally, I threw in a few lines to clean Firefox4. And I provided a sha256sum on the download page so you can verify the script's authenticity, which never hurts. Run:

sha256sum kscrubber-1.2.7.sh

and you should see
71f3893ddfcba80a92ff8afb5eb260c3024ec62dce91017b3a 1734763ce5f207 kscrubber-1.2.7.sh

I am no longer using KDE so kscrubber is not maintained much anymore, but it should still work. If there are any issues relating to newer KDE versions, if you let me know exactly what should be added or modified I may do so. I also have a more generalized version of kscrubber, but it needs to be rewritten before I release it - if I get to that I'll post an update.

And somewhat OT, please make yourself aware of the evercookie if you're not already. kscrubber should at least help with it if not eliminate it.

[Snowhog]

Re: A new privacy and log scrubber for KDE4, Firefox, & Flash

Thank you I-G. Downloaded the new script. It's on all three of my Kubuntu's.