Check this link...and let me know what you think about your privacy... http://grc.com/downloaders.htm

...Ooo one more check this site... www.lavasoft.de

Damn that's scary! If Poser does anything like this, I will break my Poser CD's and never use the product again.

Now... that was interesting...... kinda makes ye wonder ne? Wizzard

Thanks for the heads-up on this one. Real is history, at least on my machine.

I already posted this once before, but I guess it's no fault to repeat it. There always is a chance to get a "spy" tool installed on your system, either worm/virus-like or as a hidden trojan feature as described above. However, there is a serious chance that they will get you even without the need to transfer any program to your computer (and the risk to get detected). This is how it works: Most web pages have banner ads, and all of them try to place a cookie. This way they can place an ID code on your machine, and store it on their home server with your IP address. Worried? Few people only, because you think your IP number is temporary anyway. But, they can already track you by the cookie ID, they don't know who you are, but they will know when you're back somewhere, and they can store every page URL with one of their banners that you visit (with date, time, and your current IP address). Now the really frightening perspective. There are only few banner ad companies, and they started to buy eCommerce companies. Those companies have customer ID cookies of their own, and they store it (with date, time, and your current IP address) as well. And if you ever buy anything from them, they get your name, street address and credit card number. If a banner ad company buys one, it takes less than a few hours to synchronize both databases. And if you ever placed an order, and visited a different page with a banner during the same session, you will have the same IP address (!!), and they can easily link their already stored history of your visited pages with your real identity. Remember, it only takes one match, once in your entire surfing past, and they can link everything! And all of this without a virus, worm, trojan to be smuggled into your system before! What can you do? Well,... (very little) The only cure is to avoid cookies whenever possible, and the software companies did their best to make life difficult. If I get it right (please correct me if I'm wrong), both IE and NN on PC only offer "accept"/"ask"/"reject" as global options. Accepting all will expose you, rejecting all will stop 99% of all websites working, and asking will ask EVERY 4 seconds during the entire session. On Mac it looks slightly better, because IE has a very nice cookies option panel, where we can set individual options for separate websites, like accepting cookies for www.poserforum.net and www.renderosity.com, but rejecting everything else (and it only asks once for every new site). Even better, you can view and delete individual cookies. It's in versions 4.5 and 5, but I never saw this in the PC versions - does anyone know if it is planned for the forthcoming 5.5? Even better will be iCab, which will be sold to users, but offers massive protection of all sorts, for example it can accept cookies, tell the server it has been permanently accepted, but deletes it either at session end, or even immediately! Unfortunately, it is not yet finished (much lacking JavaScript so far) and will be Mac only. A free full working beta is available from: http://www.iCab.de Hopefully, some other company will soon start do something similar for the PC - it should be worth to pay a small amount of money to get a proper piece of software that protects you, instead of letting the ad companies pay the "free" browser to expose you.

then why nont just do what i do...delete the cookies after each Internet session.... For Netscape i have a template cookies just with login name and password for here (Renderosity) and nothing more...every start up i delete my History, cahe and cookie and just copy my template...on I.E. just delete all...

I.E. 5 has the same options .. you have to set it up in the security section... usually accepting temporary cookies and asking for permanent works.. of course flushing the cookie dir helps but then you have to log in all your info each time... a small price to pay for moderate security...

Wizzard, where is it exactly? I must confess that I rarely deal with PCs, most of the time just in Internet Cafes when I'm off home. Whenever I tried to find the cookies prefs in IE 5, I only found a large scroll-able list of radio buttons, only offering the accept/reject/ask trio. Is the temporary stuff hidden somewhere else? Can I delete individual cookies as well? And where do I find the cookie dir (I'm not sure if public places will allow me to access/delete it, but it is probably worth a try).

First step is to set the internet zone... go to custom...then you'll be able to set the cookie watch.... as for cookies on your computer.. presuming windows 9x.. They're under a cookie directory beneath the Windows Directory.. else under Temporary internet Files there you cen delete them one by one... if you wish ) Wizzard

Addendum: Oops.. using an internet cafe you'd have to enquire of the owners... most have the whole operating system locked off... then again... considering the numbers and interests of the varied people there... there' cookies for everything from Elvis to XXXX megaSex ) so on the public comps.. dinnae worry... this is mainly for your personal computers... After all.. who cares if you get tracked back to a terminal in a cafe? it's not like you live there.. but exercise extreme caution when making purchases on public comps... a halfway decent hacker could rip your information from the unit... Wizzard

Thanks, this is quite different to the Mac version - the internet zones prefs on Mac contain everything except for cookies, which are controlled by a separate dialog - that's why I never got the idea to look at the zones, especially when I'm in a hurry abroad already... :-)

Ooops, this is like a chat going out of sync... :-) I'm not worried about being tracked, but I don't like to leave passwords, etc. so I want to clean up everything before I leave. On PC, I only cleared the cache and history so far, but found no chance to kill the cookies - once again, Microsoft should introduce the cookies prefs to the PC browsers, it's brilliant. You see a full list of all site names, and the individual cookies. You can view each content from within IE, you can kill each of it (or all), and you can set/edit the accept/reject/ask prefs site by site.

There's a 3rd party software programme called Cookie Cutter that does that for you... along with (I think) setting up an interceptor for the browser.. Micro$oft "helps" byplacing all of the cookies in one place and naming them based on where they came from.. i.e. http://adcreatives.imaginmedia.com/.... from a banner ad... neat ne? these are found under the temporary internet files folder....

On PC go to your windows folder and there is cookies folder delete all and you are cookie free...and it's free too ;)

There's a file in Netscape called cookies.txt . Program FilesNetscapeUsersusernamecookies.txt Same thing as for IE. Delete that baby often.