Adobe's Default Flash Cookie - settings.sol

[Monroe]

I installed a little free flash cookie cleaner over two years ago ... I was always getting one flash cookie in particular and sometimes several flash cookies would show up in this little program. Finally today ... like two years late ... I took the time to find out exactly what "settings.sol" was and where it came from. I will add that sometimes there are a crazy amount of "flash cookies" to delete but most of the time maybe just two or three.

I found this interesting blog article from Oct 2010 ... Part 2 ... haven't found Part 1 but it looks like Part 2 is the one to read.

Adobe Flash, The Spy in Your Computer – Part 2

By ESET Research posted 6 Oct 2010

http://www.welivesecurity.com/2010/10/06/adobe-flash-the-spy-in-your-computer-part-2/

This small part is from the article:

"There is one spy aspect of Flash that this configuration did not stop. Adobe has a default cookie that records each Flash enabled site you visit. Using the web-based Flash Settings Manager, if you go to the website privacy settings or storage setting panels and delete all websites it will delete this history from the default cookie, but what if you don’t want the sites written at all? I decided to see if I would prevent this from happening. The default cookie is called settings.sol and its location depends upon your operating system and version. I first use the web-based panels to configure flash how I wanted and then marked settings.sol as read only.  Next I went to sites that use flash and went back to check the settings.sol file. I think it is appropriate to mention here that “SOL” in English is an acronym for Sh*t Out of Luck. I do not think this is a coincidence. When I went to look at the sol file I discovered that Flash had written a file called settings.sxx that contained the website I had visited. After marking both the sol and sxx files as read only, Flash finally stopped tracking the websites I visit."

There is a nice little free program called Flash Cookies Cleaner v1.2 ... the home website doesn't seem to offer the program anymore ... at least I could not find it but it is at this site as a free download ... all the information below is from SOFTPEDIA.

SOFTPEDIA - Flash Cookies Cleaner v1.2

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Security/Secure-cleaning/Flash-Cookies-Cleaner.shtml

Save precious disk space and keep your virtual identity safe by deleting Flash cookies with the help of this lightweight application.

Flash Cookies Cleaner is a compact application designed to scan your computer for the cookies saved by the Adobe Flash Player application in order to remove them. These cookies, also known as Local Shared Objects, are responsible for remembering the volume level on Flash video players and other settings for each website.

Helping you save some disk space

If you are not comfortable with having these settings saved on your computer you might want to delete them. The problem is that these cookies are not removed in the same way you clean the cookies saved by your browser. Actually, completely cleaning the browser has no effect on these items.

Since every Flash cookie can save up to 100 kilobytes of information, the space used for an intensive Internet user can be quite significant. It is recommended to remove them if you want to clean your hard drive and to avoid the privacy issues.

Quickly identify and remove cookies

The application has an easy to use interface that allows you to detect and to delete all the cookies with a couple of clicks. You can also review the detected items before deciding to delete them. Unfortunately, you cannot select the items that you want to remove since the app deletes all the detected cookies.

It has a small footprint and barely uses the CPU even when scanning or deleting cookies. The response time is above average since in our tests it detected and removed over eight hundred entries almost instantly.

Straightforward with little features

This app detected more items than the Adobe Website Storage Settings panel and removed them with no problems. However, it lacks the ability to change the maximum disk space for each cookie and to disable the local storage.

In conclusion

To sum it up, Flash Cookies Cleaner is a useful application for the users that want to completely remove the browsing traces from their computer with minimum effort. After intense use of the computer for entertainment purposes you might want to give this little utility a try.

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