A Virtual Exit » Protect your PC

How to delete Dogpile’s search history ?

Gili — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 18:48:32 +0000

If you share your PC with others or use public PCs you better protect your privacy by clearing your browser and toolbar search history. Today i would like to review the process you need to follow in order to delete Dogpile history and recent searches from the Dogpile toolbar. Dogpile is a metacrawler that uses an intelligent algorithm in order to aggregate search results from the most popular web searches (Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask). Dogpile offers a toolbar (that requires IE to run…) which allows you to easily search the web from your Internet Explorer browser. Toolbars are in general quite handy, however you must be aware to the fact that they record your search history, and thus compromise your privacy.

Here’s a quick step by step process in order to delete your Dogpile toolbar history:

Open your Internet Explorer browser
Click the Dopgile icon in the left hand side of the toolbar, and choose Clear History
In case you want to turn off the Dogpile search history, you can click the Dogpile icon and click Toolbar Settings.
In the Search Settings section of the Toolbar tab (the first from the left) uncheck the Turn Off Search History checkbox. This will prevent Dogpile from keeping records of your recent searches.

How to protect your PC with Finjan SecureBrowsing

Gili — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 15:36:02 +0000

Sometimes while you browse the web, you encounter those standard looking links that after being clicked suddenly deliver malware and spyware to your PC. This obviously jeopardizes your productivity, might damage your data and compromises your privacy.

The good news is that Finjan Software has developed a nifty utility can help you identify those malicious links before you click them. The Finjan SecureBrowsing Firefox extension proactively spiders the web page you are navigating and warns you about potential malicious content hiding behind links of search results, ads and other selected web pages.

The extension can be download from Mozilla. Finjan provides a similar utility for Internet Explorer users, that can be download from here.

[tags] Firefox, Finjan, Protect your PC [/tags]

Fed of SPAM ? Try a temporary email address

Gili — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 09:39:45 +0000

Many of us subscribe to new web sites almost on a daily basis. On each subscription we are usually required to provide our email address in order to get our account activated. The thing is that our email address is a precious asset and thus we better keep it out the hands of spammers. From my experience, i end up using regularly around 5-10% of the web sites i subscribe to. Some of the web sites i subscribed to but don’t use, turned to be unfriendly SPAMmers, resulting in productivity loss and other annoyances. Sort of Catch 22, isn’t it?

An applicable solution is to provide web sites we subscribe to with a temporary email address that will allow us to subscribe and evaluate the web site, but will prevent them to SPAM us in case we are not interested in their services.

There are several services that i found useful and thus i recommend you to add them to your Antispam toolbox:

1. MailExpire.com: provides a temporary email address available for a period of time starting from 12 hours to 3 months. Anything sent to that account is forwarded to your real email address.

2. GetOneMail.com: here’s the concept is a bit different. It provides you with a dispensable one-time email address that you can use for an ad hoc subscription to a web site.

3. Mailinator: provides you with a read only (and non secure) dispensable mail address that you can use when interacting with web sites that might potentially spam you.