Ever heard of Flash cookies?

Have you ever gone to the trouble of deleting all your Internet temporary files, cookies, browsing history and so on, then rebooting only to find that a web site still knows who you are? For a long time it really puzzled me how this particular web site still knew who I was after killing what I thought was every piece of identifying material on my PC.
Turns out that Adobe Flash can also be used to store cookies, unsurprisingly these are known as ‘Flash Cookies’. As you can see from the image below this is how the sites were still able to track me.

When I looked through the list of sites that had stored Flash Cookies on my system I found quite a variety including those typically from people like Doubleclick whose ‘third party cookies’ allow your browsing machine (and people who use it) to be tracked across different web sites. So, it is possible that if you go two different web sites with ‘third party cookies’, people like Doubleclick know where you’ve been and can thus start to profile you. The more you browse the more ‘third party cookies’ you get and the better the profile that is constructed about you. This profile allows advertisers to direct certain banners at you (ah ha you say, so that is why the ad seem to ‘know’ me) as well as sell your browsing habits to marketing companies. That is why many normal ‘third party cookies’ are considered spyware, because they track your activity WITHOUT your consent!
So even if your turn off or reject normal cookies these Flash cookies can still be recorded on your system allowing you to be profiled. Now, that you know about flash cookies you may well ask where on my PC can I go to turn them off? Ah ha, another gotcha – there is no setting on your PC (that I found anyway). You have to go to a page on the Adobe web site (Abode are the owners of Flash), which will query the settings on your system and allow you to make machines and present you with the control panel you see in the above picture.
As with normal cookies, disabling or deleting Flash cookies may prevent some sites from working correctly so beware. However, now that you at least know how to change the settings you can always return and adjust your settings to allow only what you deem necessary. So all you need now is the Adobe web site where you make these changes and here it is :
http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager.html
Clearly many sites are using whatever means they can to record information about you so they can profile you. To me, if they didn’t ask, that is an invasion of my privacy. I am only happy for the SITES I WANT to profile me but NO OTHERS. Heaven knows how many other avenues are out there that companies are using to track web surfers but at least now you know how to control this one.
PS I’d also make sure your select the option to TURN OFF unrestricted access to your microphone and camera. Why the hell this should ever be on by default beats the hell out of me.

More than 50,000 views

Wow, what can I say? The YouTube videos that I have created how now surpassed a total of 50,000 views since I uploaded the first video. For those that have watched the videos, I thank you, for those who have provided feedback and comments, I also thank you but I would especially like to thank all those people who have chosen to actually subscribe to my channel (which you can find at http://www.youtube.com/saturnalliance). The next target that I would like to achieve with the videos is 100 subscribers. The current count is about 85 and rising.

Once again to anyone who has taken the time to view the videos I thank you very much. Roll on 100,000 views!

/PAE on ML110

Well I tried the /PAE switch in the boot.ini of a HP ML110 with exactly 4GB of RAM and it didn’t recover any additional RAM that I eluded to a previous post.

Now juts gotta wait for a ML or DL series HP to come in the door to test with the /PAE switch.

One virtualization too many

Being so chuffed at converting all my physical machines to virtual machines I decided that maybe it was time to look at Virtual Server 2005 R2 as an option.

The good thing about Virtual Server 2005 is that it can use Virtual PC images directly which saves any messy conversions. The bad things are one – it has to go onto a Windows Server box (Virtual PC can go on Windows XP or Server) and it also needs IIS for its management console. It certainly does provide some additional flexibility but to my way of thinking makes things more complicated that I really wanted but hey I’ll give it a go.

So I copied the existing virtual PC hard disk across from the original XP host machine, configured a new virtual PC in Virtual Server 2005 and bang the image was up and running. Wow, that was easy I thought. Maybe Virtual Server is the way to go? Everything seemed to be going along swimmingly until I began to notice a number of unexpected reboots of the newly created virtual PC. Then I started to get errors about disk corruptions and messages saying the virtual PC hard disk was locked and therefore the virtual PC wouldn’t start.

Hmmm…what is the problem here? Thinking, thinking. Ah ha, noticed that most of the issues seemed to happen at the top of the hour. This was also was the time that our Shadowprotect was running creating image backups of our host machine hard disk. So it appears that Virtual Server 2005 machines don’t like imaging software like Shadowprotect. My guess would be that this is because the virtual PC hosted by Virtual Server 2005 has no idea that an image is being taken and doesn’t invoke Volume Shadow Copy. Thus the virtual server hard disk (apart from being HUGE) doesn’t get ‘frozen’ by VSS and thus issues arise. Just my guess mind you.

So in the end I shut down the Virtual Server 2005 image, copied the virtual PC hard disk back to the original XP machine, fired up Virtual PC on the original XP Machine and then launched the original virtual PC (with the updated virtual hard disk – no other changes made). Guess what? It just powered up without any issues! Clearly another benefit of using Microsoft virtual technology (ie virtual hard disk inter-changeability).

So in my experience it appears that if you have Shadowprotect (or any other imaging disk software for that matter I suspect) and you are running virtual machines (again my guess is you’ll see this whether you use Virtual PC, Virtual Server or VMWare) then you are going to have problems, that may lead to all sorts of virtual PC reboots and possible disk corruption. As I said I am not exactly sure of the specific cause but I am in the process of speaking to Storagecraft (the makers of Shadowprotect) about the issues.

You have been warned.

I found another 512MB in my HP server

Every time I install a HP with SBS I always install 4GB of RAM. Why? Well, simply put this is the limit of SBS 2003 (since it run Windows Server 2003 Standard edition) and memory is so cheap these days. In some systems (SBS Standard) sure it is probably an overkill but you never know, so 4GB it is. Problem is with HP servers you never get access to the whole 4GB of RAM. Usually about 512MB goes missing.

Missing where you ask? Well, I understood that it has to do with the motherboard and memory reserved for PCX controllers (and what not) that is never really used anyway so it just get wasted. I always accepted that as fact since I generally didn’t have much time to muck about on clients systems. However, after recently virtualizing all my server onto a single HP server with exactly 4GB of RAM I decided that I wanted to know where that lost memory actually went to, since the more RAM I have on my server the more RAM I can give my virtual machines.

So after doing some poking around I found the following link that talks about the missing memory. Now, it appears to access the memory above 4GB of RAM in Windows systems that support it (ie Windows Server Enterprise and Datacenter) you need to add the /PAE switch to the boot.ini. What does the /PAE switch do? Well, here’s a link from Microsoft that explains the function of the /PAE option.

So, because my HP server is running Windows 2003 Enterprise and has exactly 4GB of RAM I decided I had nothing to lose by giving it a go. Guess what? After the reboot I now had exactly 4GB of RAM! That’s at least 512MB more than what I had prior to adding the /PAE switch.

Hmmm…upon reading the HP link a little closer and doing some more poking about it appears that the /PAE option maybe valid on HP systems with exactly 4GB of RAM even if they are running Windows 2003 Server Standard (ie SBS 2003). Now, not having a 4GB SBS 2003 HP server to test this on I need to find a (non-production) system that I can test this on to see if it does in fact give back the 512MB consumed on SBS 2003 systems with 4GB of RAM installed.

So, if you have a HP server running SBS 2003 with exactly 4GB of RAM it may be worthwhile adding the /PAE switch to the boot.ini to see if you recover the “lost” 512MB of RAM. It shouldn’t work on SBS 2003 but it may do because it has something to do with HP machines specifically. Like I said, I haven’t actually tried this on a HP system running SBS but it certainly worked on a HP server running Windows Enterprise Server.

If someone out there wants to test the /PAE switch and let me know if it does recover the RAM I’d be grateful but in the meantime I’ll just have to bide my time until we get a new SBS order so I can test it for myself.

Help Microsoft Office videos

Microsoft has released a number of helpful Office videos. Here’s a list :

Word 2007 Demo (set of 4): Create a set of labels with mail merge

Word 2007 Demos (set of 3): Headers and footers made simple

Word 2007 Demo (set of 2): Let Word manage your table of contents

PowerPoint 2007 Demo: Add animation and sound to text and objects

Project 2007 Demo: Add, hide, and show columns

Outlook 2007 Demo: Customize your calendar

Outlook 2007 Demo: Create and use an e-mail signature

Outlook 2007 Demo: Find needles in a haystack with Instant Search

Outlook 2007 Demo: Up to speed

InfoPath 2007 Demo: Create reusable template parts

2007 Office System Demo: Enable blocked macros

2007 Office System Demo: Work with tables in a document, presentation, or message

Access 2007 Demo: Meet the Navigation Pane

Saves me having to do it!

Video number 38 is up

So it’s a New Year right? So it is about time for new video right? Right! So we have just posted our latest ‘How to’ video onto YouTube. This video shows you how to create a rule to block web sites using ISA2004 (which is part of SBS 2003 R2 Premium).

The video covers the creation of the rule as well as the impact of the rules and its (options) on a networked workstation. The video was created with the latest Camtasia Studio Version 5 so hopefully there will mean improved outputs. I am still fiddling with all the options and optimisation settings to produces the best results. Camtasia Studio Version 5 also allows the overlay of captions which looks like it will be handy as I flick between server and workstation. I still haven’t quite worked out how to manually get the zoom in option going but the software seems to do this pretty well on its own but I’d still like to know how to do it myself.

Ah well, more playing with the software and maybe actually reading the help pages will not doubt assist in this matter. So I hope that you enjoy the latest instalment and as always feel free to send you comments and abuse to director@ciaops.com where I may or may not respond depending on how much you say you like it! 😉