What are Temporary Internet Files?
Temporary Internet Files are, in fact, the cache of the Internet Explorer. This means that when you load a web page with Internet Explorer, it is saved on your computer so that if you later decide to open the same page again, it will open a lot faster. Temporary Internet Files improve speed of web browsing and also make possible so called offline browsing, which gives you the ability to open the web pages from cache even when you are not connected to the Internet.

Despite all these positive things about Temporary Internet Files, they have one big drawback: they compromise your privacy. Everyone with access to your computer can look into your Temporary Internet Files folder (location of this folder is discussed here) and see the sites that you have visited in the past. You can manually delete the contents of Temporary Internet Files folder (explained here) but this will not erase all traces of the pages because a special file called Index.dat is placed in this folder and it will still preserve the names and even the dates of your first visits to many pages.

Where is located Temporary Internet Files folder?
The location of the Temporary Internet Files folder depends on the version of Windows and whether or not you are using user profiles.

If you have Windows XP or Windows 2000 then Temporary Internet Files are in this location (note that on your PC they can be on other drive instead of drive C):
C:\Documents and Settings\\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\

If you have Windows Me, Windows 98, Windows NT or Windows 95 then index.dat files are in these locations:
C:\Windows\Temporary Internet Files\
C:\Windows\Profiles\\Temporary Internet Files\

Note that on your computer the Windows directory may not be C:\Windows but some other directory. If you don’t have Profiles directory in you Windows directory don’t worry - this just means that you are not using user profiles.

How to delete Temporary Internet Files?
To delete Temporary Internet Files manually, do the following things:

1. Start Internet Explorer and click Tools menu, then select Internet Options. This will open the Internet Options window.
2. Click General tab and then find in the section Temporary Internet Files the button Delete Files and click it. A new dialog box opens.
3. In the Delete Files dialog box, click to select the Delete all offline content check box if you want to delete all Web page content that you have made available offline.
4. Click OK to delete the files. Note that if you are doing this for the first time, the deleting can take a large amount of time, so be patient.

WARNING! This will most probably delete all visible items in the Temporary Internet Files folder (except cookies) but a number of invisible traces may remain in the index.dat files. The only way to be sure that you are getting rid of all traces for good is the usage of specialized privacy protection program like Mil Shield - a powerful privacy protection program that was designed specifically to clean and shred the Temporary Internet Files. Additional benefit is the ability to preserve the tracks from some chosen by you sites (selective cleaning), which makes your browsing more comfortable and safe (it is rather suspicious to always have empty history, cookies and Temporary Internet Files - it is better to leave some tracks from “innocent” sites). Mil Shield also cleans all other tracks as index.dat files, cookies, history, cache, AutoComplete records, UserData records, history of recently used folders and documents and many more.

Company profile:
Mil Incorporated provides software security and privacy solutions that incorporate state of the art technology, security expertise, and substantial resources.

Web address: http://www.milincorporated.com/
Article source:
http://www.milincorporated.com/a-temporary-internet-files.html

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What are cookies?
The cookies are small pieces of information (text) that are created by Web sites that you are visiting and are sent to your browser (Internet Explorer) along with the Web pages that you are viewing. Some of these cookies are saved to your hard disk and when you visit again the Web site that generated them your browser sends these cookies back to this Web site.

The purpose of the cookies is one of the following things:
- To notify the Web site that you visited it in the past. This information can be used to block some one-time services (for example Web pools, one-time promotional services, etc.).
- To remember your user name and password so that you don’t need to enter them the next time when you visit this Web site.
- To remember your personal information that is important to the Web site you are visiting. It can be your name, personal preferences, advertising information, etc.
- To show you a different ad each time when you visit the site or similar ads to one that you clicked in the past.

How to see my cookies?
Cookies are kept in special folder on your hard disk. The location of this folder depends on the version of Windows and whether or not you are using user profiles (accounts). If you have Windows Me, Windows 98, Windows NT or Windows 95 then cookie folder is in one of these locations:
C:\Windows\Cookies\
C:\Windows\Profiles\\Cookies\

Note that on your computer the Windows directory may not be C:\Windows but some other directory. If you don’t have Profiles directory in you Windows directory don’t worry - this just means that you are not using user profiles.

If you have Windows XP or Windows 2000 then cookie folder is in this location (note that on your PC it can be on other drive instead of drive C:
C:\Documents and Settings\\Cookies\

If you have only one user account on Windows XP or Windows 2000 then replace with Administrator to get the paths.

In these folders you can see all persistent cookies that are saved to your user account. The names of the cookie files are in form username@hostname. For example the cookie name administrator@altavista[2] is showing that this cookie came from www.altavista.com and the current computer user was administrator. You can also open the cookie file to see its content but it most cases it will be encoded and not human readable.

How to delete cookies?
You can delete cookies by deleting all text files in the cookie folders on your computer. The locations of cookie folders are given in the previous chapter.

The problem is that even if you delete all cookie files from the cookie folders, most of the information for the cookies will not be deleted because it is saved in the index.dat file. In some cases you can see the index.dat file in the cookie folder but even if you can not see it is there. You can not delete this file because Windows and Internet Explorer use it all the time. The only way to get rid of the cookies for good is to shred the content of the index.dat file with a specialized privacy protection program - Mil Shield. It cleans not only cookies but also the content of all other index.dat files (yes, there are many other index.dat files) along with history, temporary Internet files, recently used documents history, Google or MyWaySearch toolbars search history and many other tracks.

Company profile:
Mil Incorporated provides software security and privacy solutions that incorporate state of the art technology, security expertise, and substantial resources.

Web address: http://www.milincorporated.com/
Article source: http://www.milincorporated.com/a_cookies.html

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What is history and why is it dangerous?
Your computer (well, actually the programs on your computer) track and save many of your actions. For example Windows remembers which programs you have started, Internet Explorer remembers which websites you have visited, Google Toolbar remembers the words that you have searched for, and so on. These traces of your computer activity are commonly known as history.

Contrary to the popular belief that this is done in order to harm you as part of some sort of worldwide conspiracy, history is actually used for the purpose of making your computer experience more convenient. However, as in many other cases, the good things can be used for bad purposes. In this case the information about your computer habits can be used from someone to gather very private information about yourself and to harm you, your work, your business, or your family. The privacy threats include many more things than history. Nevertheless, history is one of the most obvious traces and is very easy to abuse.

What kinds of history are there?
There are generally two types of history: the first one is created by Windows, Internet Explorer or other parts of the operating system; and the second one is created by other applications (such as Media Player, Google Toolbar, Google Desktop, etc.). The second type is covered in the next chapter of this article.

The most important type of history is the Internet history that is created by Internet Explorer (from now on we will call it IE), which records every page that you have visited on the Internet. In order to see this history start Internet Explorer and select View -> Explorer Bar -> History. This will open a narrow window in the left side of the main IE window, which shows the pages that you have opened in the past.

The second type of history is Windows search history. It can be seen if you open the Search results window. To do that you need to click Start menu -> Search.

The next types of history are the Start menu Run history and Start menu most frequently used programs.

There are other types of history but all of them are associated with specific applications.

Applications history:
The first type of application history is called Common file dialog history. Almost every application has some sort of open/save features and most of the applications use the Windows-provided dialogs for these operations. This ensures that open/save dialogs of most programs are very similar to each other. However here comes the bad news - Windows records the names of the files that you open or save. Even if these names do not show in the file open/save dialog of particular application, they are still recorded and can be viewed from someone who knows where to look for them.

Now, let’s take a look at the Media Player history items. First, there is a list of most recently opened files in the File menu of Media Player. Second, each played file is remembered in the default playlist.

Google Toolbar, Google Deskbar, Yahoo toolbar and ICQ toobar all have a special type of search history that records the words that you have searched for.

How to delete history?
Deleting of all history traces is very hard task that can not be done manually because most of them are stored in system areas that are not directly accessible from the user. Also the history traces are so many and they are scattered at so many places that their manual deletion would be very long and tedious work with high probability of mistakes that could lead to privacy holes or even render your computer unusable.

Mil Shield is a powerful privacy protection program that was designed specifically to delete all types history that are described in this article; to clean and shred the index.dat files; and to clean all other privacy-related traces as cookies, Temporary Internet Files, AutoComplete forms and passwords, UserData records, and many others.

Company profile:
Mil Incorporated provides software security and privacy solutions that incorporate state of the art technology, security expertise, and substantial resources.

Web address: http://www.milincorporated.com/
More information about the article:
http://www.milincorporated.com/a-delete-history.html

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At last, event that was awaited for a long time by the whole developers’ community and that is expected to make developers work much easier happened – final release of .Net Framework 3.5 featuring LINQ technology is published. This very technology, as Microsoft specialists designed it, should dramatically optimize programming in general.

Mapping of relational data into object model has always been one of the most complicated problems developers face with when they design object-oriented systems. In most cases data queries are written in SQL, and their result is converted into objects. Developers have to work with absolutely different data representations. This increases effort required for the creation and support of such software application and makes appearance of errors more possible.

LINQ technology is unique for the ability to write system code and data queries using single programming language. Queries become strongly typed and as a result system reliability is increased and IntelliSense features can be used to the full extent in order to write such queries.

Except Language Integrated Query itself, new version of .Net Framework includes LINQ to SQL, which is a simple, but very powerful system of object relational mapping (ORM).

In comparison with traditional ADO.NET technology, using LINQ to SQL significantly simplifies code, reduces errors and design time of the project. Web developers will get most advantages of this, as new version of ASP.NET features special data source that allows queries directly in the Web page.

Unfortunately, LINQ to SQL doesn’t provide built-in tools to synchronize database structure with the object model; this tiresome task is entrusted to the developer. In practice, this results in increased manhours and even makes developers refuse using this promising technology.

Perpetuum Software LLC released a new version of Database Restyle, a software component that will help developers solve this problem. The product is designed to synchronize database structures. In a new version, LINQ to SQL object model as well as any other existing database schema can be used as a source database structure. And there is no need to write sophisticated code, as only few lines of code are required to create or update database structure. Just imagine to what extent developers performance will increase.

Besides that, the whole process starting from forming database object graph to executing DLL scripts is under the developer’s total control.
If necessary, it is possible to force any aspect of Database Restyle work, including:

- Re-definition of procedures of creating various database entities;
- Addition of extra entities that are not covered by the object model;
- Executing additional scripts before and after database update;
- Skip of some database objects when database is synchronized.

It is also possible to get list of differences and scripts required for update without executing database update. In other words, working with LINQ to SQL object model doesn’t differ from working with any other database structures.
“Tools for automatic database structure synchronization are absolutely needed if objects are first class entities of the application”, says Eugene Akinshin, Chief Technical Officer for Perpetuum Software.

Not the least of the factors is the fact that Database Restyle components can be integrated into both client and server applications regardless of the GUI technology used: ASP.NET, Windows Forms, or WPF and distributed inside your application without any additional fees. Full source code is available.

Using Database Restyle automates creation and synchronization of databases, helps developers save time and money required to release new versions of databases and to deploy them.

More information on Database Restyle can be found on the vendor web site:
http://www.perpetuumsoft.com/Product.aspx?lang=en&pid=55&pr=dbr11

Perpetuum Software LLC specializes in development of high-quality .NET and ASP.NET software components compatible with MS Visual Studio .NET, C# Builder, Delphi .NET and other IDEs supporting .NET Framework. Such use-proven components as Report Sharp-Shooter, Instrumentation ModelKit, OLAP ModelKit, Chart ModelKit, the .Net Dashboard Suite, OLAP + CHART ModelKit and other .NET components by Perpetuum Software LLC are already well known on the software development market and are used by developers in more than 60 countries.

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