Hacker Ten

OpenOffice and Word documents hold hidden information that includes revision logs, author name, comments, saved dates, keywords and much more, all this is called metadata and you may want to erase it for good if you are posting it to the internet or sending it to someone else as it may contain private information that was not meant to be released in public.

There is a free program called Doc Scrubber that will easily delete all of your OpenOffice or Word document,( right now it does not work with .docx).

Doc Scrubber settings

Doc Scrubber can also produce an analysis of any Word and OpenOffice document to show what metadata it contains.

Download Doc Scrubber for free

There are various tools to bypass ISP censorship filters impossed by some Governments around the World. Flickr is blocked at various Middle East countries, thankfully there is an easy Firefox addon to bypass censorship and access Flickr.

Just install the extension and restart your browser, there is no configuration, no menu, no icon. All needed configurations is done automatically.

Download Access Flickr Firefox Addon

If you want to access more sites besides flickr, there are also some Firefox extensions that will allow you to do this easily.

Chinese police raid an illegal internet cafe

FoxyProxy: is an advanced proxy management tool that completely replaces Firefox’s limited proxying capabilities. It offers more features than SwitchProxy, ProxyButton, QuickProxy, xyzproxy, ProxyTex, TorButton, etc.

Download FoxyProxy Firefox Addon

AutoProxy: With Autoproxy you no longer need to switch your proxy status between on & off manually. If you prefer to visit a website via proxy, just add it’s domain to AutoProxy’s preference.

Download AutoProxy Firefox Addon

If you need a free VPN instead check out my List of free VPN for anonymous internet browsing

To those of you who shared your personal stories on Facebook and now regret it, deleting the account will solve future embarassments, although if you do not trust Facebook then use fake data, that is the best thing you can do to protect your privacy.

There is an unofficial Facebook group called “How to permanently delete your Facebook account” with step-by-step instructions.

To delete your facebook account just visit:

http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_account

Click submit, then wait two weeks for your account to be deactivated. Logging in to Facebook before the two weeks are up will void the deletion request, make sure once you request deletion you do not log in again.

Deleting social networking sites accounts

Information on how to delete your account from all of the major social networking sites and services across the web can be found at Deleteyouraccount.

To erase all of your data at LinkedIn, LiveJournal, MySpace, Google and other social networking sites simply visit:

DeleteYourAccount.com

We have recently seen Internet Explorer 8, Firefox +3.5 and Safari adding an internet browsing “privacy mode”, using it you are supposed not to leave internet cache, history cookies or anything else that could jeopardise your internet surfing privacy, but there are at least two things that still give away what sites you have visited.

• Cached DNS Entries: In order to be able to surf the internet you will need use a DNS server to resolve the URLs and this will be cached locally into your machine for a while to speed up your internet surfing, this entries also get cached in private mode browsing.

You can see this yourself opening up the command prompt inWindows, type command.com or cmd.exe at the search box to get to the Windows command prompt box.

Now type:
ipconfig /displaydns

Windows Command Line Prompt cmd.exe

You will see the full list of cached DNS entries, open up a new private browsing session, re-run the command again and see how the sites you just visited got added. Anyone with access to your computer, such as a noisy College systems administrator or your boss at work can see this too.

To clean up the cache just type in:
ipconfig /flushdns

• Flash Cookies: Even in privacy mode evil flash cookies will get stored into the %appdata%\Macromedia\Flash Player\#SharedObjects directory, and they can reveal what sites gave them to you, and what day and at what time you visited them, you can delete these flash cookies manually.