Tag Archives: html

HTML5 Privacy Matters: DOM Storage. How to solve it in only 2 steps!

Recently I started an online course that was created using the Google Course Builder.

After I registered the course I was not able to access it because “my browser didn’t allow the web storage” and, for this reason, a message informed me that it would be necessary to use a up-to-date browser as Chrome or Firefox.

The only problem is that I always use Firefox. Obviously a “particular” version of Firefox where I also added a bunch of different add-ons to enhance the privacy protection level of my navigation and, for this reason, the Google course was not available for me.

Normally I would have decided to quit the course because I prefer not to modify my Firefox configuration after I spent so much time searching the best add-ons to preserve a minimum of privacy. But, in this case, I really wanted to attend the course and so I decided to manually operate on the Firefox configuration to “solve” the problem and allow Google to keep all the information it would have considered as essential.

This is the list of what I did:

– open Firefox and type:

about:config

in the address bar.

– search for:

dom.storage.enabled

and change its configuration from “false” to “true” double-clicking on it.

After this fast change in the Firefox’s configuration menu I was able to attend the Google course but….. I am conscious that my privacy is a little bit less protected because now Google can store up to 5 MB of content on my browser. In fact, before HTML 5 we were used to “cookies” and we were able to “manage” (better: erase) them also if, as the LSO Flash cookies, they were more persistent than usual. Moreover in the old html times, the space available for cookies on your local browser was 4 KB (yes… KB) but now, in the Html 5 era, a single website can easily manage and permanently store till 5 MB on your browser. And this is the reason why I decided to protect my privacy disabling the DOM Storage on Firefox and this is also the reason because I will disable DOM Storage as soon as I complete the Google course…

If you are not a simple user but you prefer to directly and consciously operate on the Firefox configuration to improve your privacy level, you would read this interesting post by BestVPN.

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References:

https://www.bestvpn.com/blog/8499/make-firefox-secure-using-aboutconfig/

https://www.bestvpn.com/blog/8337/things-go-bump-night-http-etags-web-storage-history-stealing/

Open Source tools and applications for web developers

How to convert pdf to html on Ubuntu 9.04

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This week, in our Linux Page (in Spanish), we tried to find how to freely convert pdf to html files. Unfortunately we have not been able to discover a satisfying solution. In fact, first of all (1) we upload our complex pdf file (text, color drawing and pictures) on Gmail email and we sent it to ourself. When we opened the email we click on “view as html” option and we were able to read the text (unfortunately too tiny) without drawings and pictures. It was not bad but we were really far from what we were looking for. As second experiment (2) we tried to use Kword and we had (as html) text and pictures but there were many incongruences between the texts and the borders and we missed some phrases. In few words, we had a better look but a worse result. Then (3) we installed pdftohtml using Synaptic Package Manager but unfortunately we were not satisfied from the html file we obtained. At this point we concentrated our researches on a free online solution and in order we tried: “Online conversion tools for Adobe PDF documents“, “convertpdftohtml“, “pdftextonline“, and “pdf-search-engine” but the results were not good. Unfortunately, we dismissed and I confess we could not find a solution to solve the task but we think that the “Kword solution”, if improved, is not far from a good solution in converting the file from pdf to html. Please, if you have suggestions about this topic, feel free to add a comment. Thank you.

NoteCase: a simple multiplatform (Linux, Windows, OS X) freeware to preserve the privacy of your notes!

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Today in our Freeware Page we added a brief post about NoteCase a powerful note editor for Linux. In our tests we installed NoteCase on a Ubuntu 8.04 with positive results. This free software allows you to write complex notes dividing them between “nodes” and, if you need, it is also possible to easily create child notes at each level. Moreover, using NoteCase you can insert images and links to your text. Using NoteCase, for complex projects, you can decide to insert tag in each node and find them in just few clicks with the “Find” feature. Last, but not least, when you save your notes, you can decide to save them into an encrypted file. In few wordsNoteCase is one of the best freeware to manage notes using different OS without risks. Recommended!