Flash cookies are the secret nasties of using the Flash player on any platform. These are somewhat like the ordinary HTTP cookies that Web sites infest on our systems. Some HTTP cookies have useful purpose, but the majority of HTTP cookies are tracking cookies.

LINUX USERS can banish forever Adobe's Flash Player cookies, which can be a good idea because, for one thing, as a plugin Flash doesn't observe web browsers' Private Browsing modes.

SafeSquid's Cookie Filter Section, allows you to control exchange of cookies between users and websites. You can define what websites are allowed / denied to exchange cookies with users, either to enhance security, or to disable the users from logging into their personal accounts.

Fedora 15, code-named Lovelock, does not ship with commercial applications. Which means that you are not able to install essential applications like Adobe Flash Player from the graphical package manager. There are a few open source Flash plugins, but they do not render current Flash content very well, if at all.

Web browser cookies always struck me as a minor issue. Although anti-malware programs often flag them as something to be removed, this always struck me as a scare tactic. However, when Google started the rollout of a new cookie-based tracking system last month, it seemed time to take a new look at cookies with the goal of protecting privacy.

Slashdot: The Guardian newspaper has teamed up with Mozilla to research the monitoring of online behavior through cookies and other web trackers. After downloading the Collusion add-on for Firefox, you can generate a visual representation of all the cookies that have been downloaded which are linked to the sites you have visited. This shows quite an interesting picture.

« WILMINGTON, Del., Dec. 2, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- The law firms of Sianni & Straite LLP of Wilmington, DE, Eichen Crutchlow Zaslow & McElroy LLP of Edison, NJ, and Keefe Bartels L.L.C. of Red Bank, NJ, have today filed a class action complaint in Federal Court in Wilmington, Delaware related to the unprecedented breach of the digital privacy rights of 150 million cell phone users.

An excellent argument against the use of iPads and iPhones with some surprising names on the roster of offenders.

One of the remaining gaps in the GNU/Linux desktop is an editor for producing Flash content. When viewing Flash files, users can limp along with Adobe's proprietary player or the still-incomplete although free Gnash player, but the best they can do for Flash creation is employ the limited ability of OpenOffice.org Draw to export to the format.