Entries with tag "history"

Dublin was fun, though not as enjoyable for me as the countryside. The high point for me, of course, was the Guinness Storehouse. But that came last.

We got up this morning at 7am (OK, it became more like 8:15am) to eat a quick breakfast and catch the "hop-on, hop-off" tour bus that stopped at our hotel at 9. We got off at the first stop, near the General Post Office where the IRA siezed the building in 1916 and declared independence from Ireland (and were subsequently shelled into submission). It also happened to be the location of the 400' Metal Spike Of Annihilation, to my glee.

[Entry Continues...]

This article on Web Browser Forensics (Part 1, Part 2) describes some of the tools and methods we use when investigating a suspected intrusion. I thought some of you might find it interesting/creepy to see how much information can be retrieved from the digital wake your web browser creates as you browse. Some of it is kind of technical, but if you're not interested in the details you can skim through part 1 and look at the screenshots of the various tools and get the gist of what's possible. Example: a cached Hotmail page.

The information described in the article is retrieved from the web browser's cache and history files. Internet Explorer ostensibly lets the user erase their cache and history, but it's interesting to note that the Content.IE5/index.dat and History.IE5/index.dat files — which contain the listing of visited URLs — are not erased when this occurs. In other words, IE will delete the cached content itself but preserves the list of URLs a user has visited. These files are locked by the operating system on startup, so they can't even be deleted manually under normal conditions. To remove them, you have to reboot your computer into command prompt mode and delete them from there. This "feature" has proved useful to us but not as beneficial for the users we've investigated.