Browzar is a Lightweight Portable and Private Web Browser
With the private browsing and incognito mode for current web browsers, it offers absolute privacy for web surfers because all cache and history won’t be saved and automatically cleaned when the session is terminated. There are also third party extension that auto cleans up browser temporary files when exit but there are times when you have too many extension installed and will cause some incompatibility problems. One method is to use the portable version of Firefox browser and run the private browsing mode or manually clear the recent history.
Another way is to use Browzar, a very small and lightweight browser that is only 209KB in size which allows you to search and surf the web without leaving traces on your computer. Browsing history, stored files, cookies and search auto-complete won’t be saved on the computer. The only reason why Browzar is so small in sizer is because it is based on Internet Explorer’s engine. Most websites have better compatibility with IE so you won’t be facing problems in opening complicated websites.
Browzar doesn’t support third party extensions like Chrome or Firefox. It is meant to be a portable and private browser which you can run directly from a USB stick. When you close Browzar, you will notice that it automatically perform cleanup by deleting history, cookies, temporary internet files, temporary java files and flash local shared objects.
Browzar might be a little old as it was last updated on December 2008 but it is still a good alternative for a portable and private web browser.
Stop Your Facebook Account from Showing in Google, Yahoo and Bing Search Engines
April 10, 2010 by admin
Filed under Online Service, Privacy
Facebook is currently the most used social website in the world. If you lost contact with a few good friends you known during high school, chances are they will end up in Facebook and you can get in touch with them from there. However Facebook being the most active social website, search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing tends to crawl and index your facebook profile and your name is now searchable in search engines. Signing up Facebook does have it pros such as getting in touch with old friends but it can be a privacy intrusion.
Imagine this situation, a stalker wants to get to know more about you so they search for your name in Google. Voila they found your Facebook account and surely there are a lot of private information which are protected by default. They can sign up a new Facebook account and try to trick you into accepting them as your friend using social engineering methods.
Fortunately there is a setting in Facebook where it can protect your privacy by stopping your Facebook profile from showing in search engine without deleting your Facebook account. Login to your Facebook account, click on Account and select Privacy Settings. Click on Search and uncheck the Allow button for Public Search Results.
Instantly Hide All Tabs in Google Chrome with PanicButton
This extension called PanicButton for Google Chrome browser is very useful to hide all opened tabs with a single click or a hotkey. For example, if your company needs you to login to their local webserver with a web browser to key in data into the database, you wouldn’t want your boss or superior to catch you opening other websites when they are somewhere around you that can see what’s on your computer screen.
The good thing about PanicButton is by default you can either press the Escape button to hide all tabs or set it to click on the PanicButton icon. You can also set a password to protect your stored tabs so that when people sees the PanicButton icon and clicked on it, they will be asked to input a password before all the tabs are restored back. A safe page can also be set which means that when all tabs are hidden with PanicButton, you can set only webpage to load on the single tab.
We have given PanicButton a test and it seemed to work perfectly on the first time we clicked on the PanicButton. After that it just would not work until you close and restart the Chrome browser. Moreover the numbers that is shown in the PanicButton icon never goes away even after restoring it. We can see that PanicButton is still a little buggy and the developer of this extension is looking for some help to improve it.
PaperBus Provides Free Proxy Service to Access Blocked and Filtered Websites
Some countries such as China and Iran are very unfortunate to have a government that forces the Internet Service Provider to block and filter some websites to stop their users from accessing the websites. The internet filtering measures are taken to stop critical online opinion comes after a series of large anti-Japanese, anti-pollution and anti-corruption protests on forums, websites, blogs and etc.
If for some reasons you want to access the blocked websites or perhaps your ISP could have wrongly blocked a website that isn’t supposed to be blocked in the first place, you can either opt for open proxy or vpn. Open proxy is free but searching for a working one can take up a lot of time and as for VPN, it cost money. One of the easiest way to bypass blocked or filtered websites is by using PaperBus.
PaperBus is free and fast application that makes a tunnel between your web browser to a proxy located in the United States. Basically it is the same as using open proxy but PaperBus makes it easy so that you don’t need to set the proxy IP and port in the browser’s network settings. All you need to do is run PaperBus, click the ON button and launch your web browser.
PaperBus currently is able to hook Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Safari browser. If you are from China or Iran, you can choose the region information to have a better routing or else just select Other. The Filter tab in the Settings window allows you to specify the URLs you do not want PaperBus to proxy. PaperBus is a multi-platform application that can be installed on Windows, Mac and Linux.
Windows 7 Left Pane Start Menu Empty or Blank
Starting from Windows XP, it features a new Start Menu where it allows you to access your recently opened programs and documents. However many XP users still stick to the old classic Start Menu where it is smaller and tidier. When it comes to Windows 7, the classic menu was totally removed but there are third party software that can replace the original Windows 7 start menu to the classic version.
The recently opened programs and items in Windows 7 Start Menu does provide a logical and convenient way for you to access your most frequently used software but it is definitely not good for people who wants privacy. You can easily disable storing and displaying recently opened programs and items in the Start Menu by right clicking at the Taskbar and select Properties. Then go to the Start Menu tab and uncheck the two boxes for Privacy.
You will notice that your Windows 7 start menu left pane instantly gets cleared out and becomes empty. Disabling both Privacy options will still leave the box empty and does not make the Start Menu smaller. What you can do with that area is to pin shortcuts or else it will remain empty or blank.
Hide Drive Letter from Appearing in My Computer with Hide My Disk
One easy way for snoopers to dig around your files is by opening My Computer and voila, every data and files on your computer is shown. The snooper will now need to go through all the folders to see if he can find for any confidential or sensitive file. Another easy way to protect against such snoopers is to hide the drive letter from appearing in My Computer in the first place.
There are quite a number of ways to do it but we think that the easiest way is to use a free software called Hide My Disk. You can hide a disk letter from appear in My Computer with a single click. Just run Hide My Disk, select the drive and click Hide button. The changes takes effect immediately without rebooting the computer. To unhide, select the hidden drive and then click the Unhide button. You cannot hide the system disk which where Windows is installed.
There are 3 versions of Hide My Disk. The lite version which is free and is the most basic that enables you to hide and unhide drives. The Standard version has an extra Password Protection to protect the software from being able to use by unauthorized users. As for the PRO version, you have an additional feature of Hard Disk Monitor & Utility, Remote Control and Hide Single Folders or files.
If you just want to hide a drive letter, the Lite edition will do just fine. You can use it to hide the drive and then remove the shortcut and rename the software executable to something else so that people won’t know what did you use to hide the drive letter. Not a perfect method but it’s a very simple and straight forward one.
Prevent Restore Makes Deleted Confidential Files Unrecoverable
If you have a confidential data in a file or sensitive photo on your computer that could get you into trouble with the law, or just wanted to keep it away from other people getting to it, by simply deleting it from your computer and emptying the recycle bin is not enough. When you empty the recycle bin, the file is gone from your computer but not totally wiped out as it is marked as deleted only and awaits for files to overwrite the space.
There are tools that can totally wipe out an existing file but you may probably left a few out and still exposed to risk of the files being recovered. One of the best way is to use Prevent Restore which is able to wipe free disk space on your hard disk to avoid any possible recovery of already deleted files. This operation is safe for existing files and they will not be damaged.
Prevent Restore is very easy to use. After installation, run the program and you will get to a part to select the disks on which you want to run anti-recovery options. You then get to select which method you would like to use to replace the deleted files. For the free version you can only use replaces with spaces which is good enough to prevent from any ordinary data recovery tools.