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#1 2011-03-29 12:24:21

x33a
Forum Fellow
Registered: 2009-08-15
Posts: 4,587

Controlling flash behaviour

This post is just an informative post about how flash saves its settings and how some sites misuse it.

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.

Last edited by x33a (2011-03-29 12:24:59)

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#2 2013-01-05 15:39:39

ewaller
Administrator
From: Pasadena, CA
Registered: 2009-07-13
Posts: 19,728

Re: Controlling flash behaviour

Moderator:  It has been pointed out to the mods that this rather informative thread does not show up in forum searches when users are not logged in because it is in the off-topic subforum.  I am going to move this to 'Multimedia and Games' because it is a useful topic.


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