[Gloucs] Frustrate their knavish tricks.

[N Clarke]

As far as I know, there's no particular data-mining that can be done 
with flash that can't be done just with cross-site images or the like.

Gnash is a project attempting an open source reimplementation of flash, 
which is a proprietary codec. Its attempt is to be compatible with flash 
code, so if you're that its use by itself will prevent data mining, I 
suspect you're probably out of luck. Of course you may still want to use 
it from the open source angle. On my system, firefox plugins are stored 
at /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins, so if you want to use gnash you should 
probably make sure you have the gnash plugin in there and not the flash 
provided one. Uninstalling the flash plugin using whatever your distro's 
package manager is is probably the best way to achieve this. You should 
be able to check what's in use through entering about:plugins into the 
firefox address bar.

If you want to block flash, you're probably better looking at something 
like flashblock (http://flashblock.mozdev.org/) which will prevent flash 
objects being executed unless you request it.

In terms of javascript, note that there's a big difference between 
javascript and Java - the use of the word 'java' in both places is 
rather confusing, since there's really no link between them. You may 
well find you're using javascript without realising it on many sites 
(lots of the useful functionality on google, for example).  If you're 
still concerned about it, you can disable javascript fairly easily in 
firefox preferences->content.

Cheers,

Nick

Geoff Bagley wrote:
> I have become aware that an increasing number of web sites require 
> "flash" to be installed.
>
> I understand flash  to be contaminated with data-mining  on behalf of 
> advertisers who wish to
> know the sites in which I, or my family,  interest themselves.
>
> This is,  in my view,  none of their business,  so I installed 
> GNU/Linux  "gnash" in the hope of defeating this snooping.
>
> It doesn't seem to help. 
>
> Please how do I tell my (several)  browsers  how to  use gnash to 
> replace flash ?
>
> Is there a prefered GNU/Linux browser from this point of view.
>
> A similar problem may concern Java scripts. 
>
> I find it difficult to trust such scripts,  and would like to turn off 
> Java  ( which I do not use anyway).
>
> Best regards to all.
>
> Geoff
>
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