Well, like many other people i was having trouble with adobe flash player's hardware acceleration, similar to one mentioned here: https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/22878
So, i disabled it in /etc/adobe/mms.cfg and even by right clicking a flash element -> settings and unchecking enable hardware acceleration. But for some reason it used to get re-enabled. Then i realized that i was using bleachbit and it was clearing all contents of ~/.macromedia.
Now there's a file called settings.sol stored at
~/.macromedia/Flash_Player/macromedia.com/support/flashplayer/sys/settings.sol
This file stores flash settings such as the cache, hardware acceleration, allow camera and microphone for specific sites etc.
I wanted to prevent bleachbit from deleting settings.sol, but delete every other crap that's present in ~/.macromedia. One way was to edit bleachbit's cleaner for flash, but i didn't want to go that route, as i considered it less ideal. So, i set the immutable attribute to settings.sol by using
# chattr +i settings.sol
Now bleachbit couldn't delete this particular file, but did delete the rest of ~/.macromedia. This solved the above problem for me.
Later on after a browsing session i ran bleachbit, and found a file settings.sxx in bleachbit's log. I was sure i had never seen this file before, so i googled for it.
Seems like some sites change your settings.sol file without your permission, but if this file is set to read-only (which isn't by default), then they write to the file settings.sxx. And i suppose it is used for tracking purposes.
So i created an empty file settings.sxx aside settings.sol, and set it to read-only. So, i hope now i am sufficiently safe from flash based tracking.
I hope this post helps other people realize the problems that flash poses before us.
Please note that i am not overly paranoid, but i dislike sites doing stuff behind my back, especially on my computer.
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