You Deleted Your Cookies? Think Again (Wired) [LWN.net]

You Deleted Your Cookies? Think Again (Wired)

Posted Aug 11, 2009 17:03 UTC (Tue) by tavis (guest, #14187)
Parent article: You Deleted Your Cookies? Think Again (Wired)

Is there any good reason not to just run a cron or init script that deletes everything in ~/.macromedia? Is there likely to be anything of value stored in the directory?

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You Deleted Your Cookies? Think Again (Wired)

Posted Aug 11, 2009 17:12 UTC (Tue) by sitaram (guest, #5959) [Link] (2 responses)

I've been running like this for more than a year now:

[ff@sita-lt ~]$ ls -al |grep null
lrwxrwxrwx 1 ff ff 9 2009-01-01 17:46 .macromedia -> /dev/null

You Deleted Your Cookies? Think Again (Wired)

Posted Aug 12, 2009 5:44 UTC (Wed) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link]

To avoid spurious problems just think about bugs in closed-source software"!!!" it might be useful, as a fallback, to use `mount -t tmpfs none $HOME/.macromedia`, though of course that only "clears" it on boot rather than whenever you restart firefox.

You Deleted Your Cookies? Think Again (Wired)

Posted Aug 12, 2009 9:57 UTC (Wed) by mlankhorst (subscriber, #52260) [Link]

or chown 0:0 .macromedia .adobe; chmod 000 .macromedia .adobe :)

You Deleted Your Cookies? Think Again (Wired)

Posted Aug 11, 2009 19:08 UTC (Tue) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link] (3 responses)

> Is there any good reason not to just run a cron or init script that deletes everything in ~/.macromedia?

Is there any good reason that the plugin's behavior is not illegal?

If I invite someone over for dinner, I don't expect them to dig through my dresser drawer to find my spare door key and have a copy made so that they can let themselves in later.

You Deleted Your Cookies? Think Again (Wired)

Posted Aug 11, 2009 21:56 UTC (Tue) by mikachu (guest, #5333) [Link]

You're the one running the code, they just gave it to you. Why would/how could it be illegal?

its probably in the EULA

Posted Aug 13, 2009 8:08 UTC (Thu) by alex (subscriber, #1355) [Link] (1 responses)

I'd be fairly sure this behaviour is somewhere in Flash's EULA (not that I have checked).

its probably in the EULA

Posted Aug 13, 2009 12:26 UTC (Thu) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link]

... which doesn't mean it is legal.
When something written in a contract is not legal, it is just considered as if it where not written at all, the rest being still valid.

You Deleted Your Cookies? Think Again (Wired)

Posted Aug 11, 2009 20:27 UTC (Tue) by tetromino (guest, #33846) [Link] (2 responses)

> Is there likely to be anything of value stored in the directory?

Well, if you play flash games, that's where your preferences and save files will be stored.

You Deleted Your Cookies? Think Again (Wired)

Posted Aug 12, 2009 13:37 UTC (Wed) by kfiles (subscriber, #11628) [Link] (1 responses)

> Is there likely to be anything of value stored in the directory?

Also, the flash cache is used to improve performance, and in the case of features like bitmap filters and compositing on vector art, is a prerequisite. So, some of the niftier UI elements of flash apps could break if the asset cache isn't writable. I'm not sure whether they would degrade gracefully, or not.

You Deleted Your Cookies? Think Again (Wired)

Posted Aug 15, 2009 2:02 UTC (Sat) by dirtyepic (guest, #30178) [Link]

on my system the asset cache is in ~/.adobe, or at least it contains an AssetCache directory that ~/.macromedia does not.