If you think that you’re the only user on your computer and nobody is watching what you’re doing on the PC or what kind of websites you visit, you may be wrong because there is a possibility that your Internet Service Provider or the government is monitoring your online activities. More and more users are aware of the privacy risk and are willing to spend a little bit of money in subscribing to a VPN service to protect their privacy by encrypting the Internet connection.

Once you’re on a VPN connection, all your incoming and outgoing data is encrypted and routed to the VPN server. This effectively prevents your ISP or the government from monitoring your online activities. Unfortunately nothing is perfect because there is always the possibility of a leak that will reveal your real IP address. Let’s say you’re downloading sensitive material through BitTorrent and you think that you’re safe because you’re connected to a VPN. When your VPN connection suddenly disconnects, you are instantly routed back to your normal connection and your BitTorrent client will automatically resume downloading through your direct Internet connection.

This is why some people still receive DMCA infringement notices from their ISP even though they are connected to a VPN. There are some VPN service providers like LiquidVPN that solve the problem by implementing a kill switch feature known as Liquid Lock whereby all connections are automatically blocked when it detects a disconnection. Another well known method is by terminating the selected application when the VPN disconnects. If you’ve already subscribed to a VPN service that doesn’t come with a kill switch feature, here are 5 ways to implement one yourself to prevent the potential IP leak without messing with confusing firewall configurations.
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Browser cookies are probably the most important pieces of history data stored on the computer that can be used to keep a user logged on to a website, remember your flash video player volume setting, items added to shopping cart, and even to the extent of tracking the user’s web browsing habits. That is how sometimes you find a website showing an advertisement that is related to what you’ve just searched on the Internet.

Fortunately every web browser is capable of clearing the history browsing data which includes the visited websites, download history, form data, cache and cookies by simultaneously pressing the Ctrl+Shift+Delete keys. However, some websites use the more advanced tracking technique which is flash cookies that cannot be removed by clearing your web browser’s history data. Apart from that, flash cookies have the potential of storing an enormous amount of tracking information due to the default size limit of 100KB per website compared to only 4KB for HTTP cookies.

If you’re concerned about your Internet privacy and don’t want your online behavior to be tracked, we’ll show you a few different methods to clear your flash cookies and also how to permanently block flash cookies from being downloaded and stored into your computer.
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We’ve had a few requests from users in the forum recently asking how to uninstall or remove the REFOG Keylogger from their computer. REFOG Keylogger logs all key presses on your PC and saves any text pasted from the clipboard. It even does periodic screen captures to give an illustrated usage history of the PC. REFOG can also decode chat conversations in many instant messengers, track Web sites and resources visited and log all applications launched. In short, it monitors everything you do on your computer. REFOG isn’t the only tool that can do this and there are many keyloggers that can do a similar or even better job at logging your actions.

Uninstalling a keylogger on your computer is not really that easy because it naturally doesn’t want to be found. It’s totally hidden from task manager and if you try to uninstall it using the official uninstaller, you need to enter the Master Password otherwise it won’t proceed. Most antivirus or antispyware software is able to detect keyloggers but there are times when these security tools won’t be able to fully remove it and ends up making the PC unstable.
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There are quite a number of ways to change your IP address probably to protect your privacy by preventing scripts from tracking your surfing behavior, accessing blocked websites such as video streaming sites or even online promotions that are only available for visitors from certain countries. It is also well known that these proxy software can bypass blocked sites in universities and corporate networks. Although you can find a lot of websites publishing new and fresh proxy lists daily, most of the time, half or more proxies from the list are no longer working plus you need to manually scan using a proxy scanning tool to identify the good and bad ones. This is very time consuming and requires an advanced knowledge of computers.

An easier method is to use VPN which will work out of the box after installing the software (OpenVPN) or using the Windows supported PPTP protocol. VPN is considerably more stable than the public open proxy but most of them are paid services where some providers offer free VPN trial accounts with limitations. Back to proxy, there are a few organizations that maintain a pool of working proxy servers for free and all you need to do is download their portable program, run it and configure your web browser to connect to the program. The portability makes it convenient to save it to a USB flash drive so you can use it on the go.
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If you’ve accidentally downloaded a sensitive image file that can get you into trouble, deleting the file from Windows is just not enough even if you’ve perform a secure wipe. Forensics people can still retrieve the image from your computer, thanks to the thumbnail caching feature. When you open a folder containing a lot of images, the thumbnail caching feature will greatly improve the time that takes to show the images via thumbnails rather than regenerating them every time you get in to the folder.

In Windows XP, the hidden thumbnail file which is thumbs.db are placed at the same location of the images but in Windows Vista/7, the thumbnail files are stored at the user’s folder but will still generate thumbs.db when you access shared network folders.

This thumbnail caching feature can be an invasion of privacy and we’ll show you how to view the thumbnails inside the database cache file, clear them and and also how to disable it from caching more thumbnails.

Here is how to do it.
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Every web browser uses database method to store the history locally on the hard drive for faster access and one example is Firefox that uses SQLite database. Unless you have a SSD hard drive or put your Firefox profile’s database in RAMDisk, eventually Firefox web browser will come to a crawl when the SQLite database file size gets too big. Internet Explorer too does the same by storing it in a file called INDEX.DAT. If you search in your hard drive, you will probably find more than 20 index.dat files where each of them are used to store different information such as cookies, history, cache, form data and etc.

One well known problem in Internet Explorer is even if you delete all browsing history in Internet Explorer by pressing Ctrl+Shift+Del, the index.dat file size remains the same and is not re-sized. Not only that, it does not really clear all of the index.dat entries because some of them still contains old caches, cookies and history information. Using the famous CCleaner with additional rules also does not fully clean up all the history especially the ones with .IE5 in temp folder. You also cannot manually delete the file because it is locked and being used by Windows Explorer unless you do it in Safe Mode.
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Even when you just mention the word “Torrent” these days, it’s automatically associated with piracy and downloading music or movies. While this may be true to a large degree, bittorrent can still be used for completely legitimate downloading including Linux ISO images and game patches to name only a few.

If we’re honest though, most people don’t consider watching something like an episode from a TV show which hasn’t been aired in your country yet, that bad. But unfortunately, there are anti P2P organizations that frown on downloads like this just as much as the latest movie or music album. And every torrent users favorite acronyms, the RIAA or MPAA will be doing what they can to try and stop you even for downloads most people would think are totally acceptable.
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