Barely suitable for schoolwork
Man sues Microsoft for porn ’embarrassment’ – Metro.co.uk
A computer user is suing Microsoft for £100,000 because his PC’s Internet Explorer program did not delete records of the pornography he viewed.
Michael Crooker claims he was told his settings meant that his browser’s history would be deleted after five days.
But he suffered ‘great embarrassment’ when his porn history was found by police, who arrested him in Connecticut on weapons charges, including allegations of selling illegally modified firearms and possessing bomb-making equipment.
His name won’t stand good in court…
Maybe now Microsoft will have to explain why they save all that information about your surfing in various hidden folders on your hard disk?
The guy has a point. Why is all that crap saved even though it is supposed to be deleted after 5 days?
” Darn it. MS should also cover the tracks of bank robbers. Poor fool.” Where did it say he was a bank robber?
When you delete something in winblows its still on the hard drive.
#7, pedro,
Firefox immediately treated this as a bug and worked to fix it. MS doesn’t care so I don’t see your comparison.
Even if the browser “deleted” it. The information would still be on the hard disk. “Actually, none of them have grounds.” DUH!!!
Your title sounds like more mindless reflexive IE-bashing. This guy could have been exposed by Firefox, Opera, or any other browser.
Your title sounds like more mindless reflexive IE-bashing. This guy could have been exposed by Firefox, Opera, or any other browser, since they all cache web data locally.
#11, it doesn’t matter if they fixed it, I lost my fiancee.
I hope you are being rhetorical and it was someone else that lost their fiancée.
My point is that the Mozilla community heard the issue and took immediate action. MS does not have the same reputation. Too often when informed of a bug or security issue, MS will take months to fix it.
BUT, I use Firefox and haven’t even looked at IE in about a year.
A forensic examination of his drive would have uncovered his misdeeds anyway. The best way to avoid the police examining your hard drive is to stay out of trouble in the first place. This guy obviously knew what he was doing was wrong.
bahahaha
pure idiocy
Opera is the browser of choice. Both IE and Firefox are cheap imitations.
“Your title sounds like more mindless reflexive IE-bashing. This guy could have been exposed by Firefox, Opera, or any other browser, since they all cache web data locally.”
No, that’s rubbish.
IE *also* has the index.dat file, which other browsers do not:
http://tinyurl.com/ous6l
Moreover, IE even writes URIs to the registry:
“Sadly, IE7 is still stashing typed URLs in the registry, and not in the …\LowRegistry location, either. I found them in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\TypedURLs”
http://tinyurl.com/2zojer
That browser is broken in so many ways. A pervert would be extremely unwise to use it. But so would anybody else.
[Ed. – Please use Tinyurl.com when providing links]
#14:
“The best way to avoid the police examining your hard drive is to stay out of trouble in the first place.”
Forget everything you just heard and go back to sleep. That’s a good citizen.
The definition of “trouble” has changed a lot in the past five years.
#18, yes indeed, especially in a world that has “extraordinary rendition” policies.
8. Pedro is correct, you can format your hard drive, but I have software that will unformat it and recover the data, be it a Mac or a PC. I do it almost routinely. It makes no difference whether your browser says it deletes it or not.
For best protection, it’s best to surf the net using a browser installed on a “U3 enabled” USB drive.
I keep all my porn and other stuff there to avoid this embarrassing problem.
#20, I don’t get your point. #7’s link was to someone using FF and his girlfriend found his porn stash by using his password. That is what I commented on. The only true way to remove information is to write over it on the HD, repeatedly. You are correct and I have recovered information from FAT that was formatted to NTFS. I lost some of the video, but saved all the other files.
For the truly paranoid, #23 makes a good point by using an external browser. Although I do give some points to #18 and “don’t do the crime if ya can’t do the time”.
23. Correction noted. My bad.
25 – Right. Not only that, but NTFS is a journaled file system, as are the ‘nix Reiser and EXT file systems. Even if you use an overwriting “eraser” type utility, there is reason to doubt you’re getting rid of all traces of where you’ve been or what you looked at. People who might be at risk from political or religious enforcement bureaucrats can be considerably more at risk than they think.
pedro- OK from now on I’m using names, all the numbers are confusing me.
Damn 60’s!!!!