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Casino TechLet’s begin with a simple truth: anything you type into your computer could be saved, cached, archived and later retrieved without you ever knowing any of it happened.
For example, a few months back Chuck installed a new casino on his computer. He went to the deposit page and bam! the casino knew everything already: name, credit card type, number, expiry date, the works.
It turned out that his info had been saved into the Windows Registry by a previous program. Think of the Registry as Windows’ cached memory and internal structure rolled into one. So there it was, in a public section of the Registry, unencrypted, and available to any program that knew enough to ask for it.
The Registry isn’t the only place where personal information is saved. Cookies are another. A cookie is simply a little file created by a web site to record information about your last visit. The idea is that on your next visit that particular site they can read their cookie and thereby reestablish your browsing status with them.
While cookies make the web more convenient they also introduce a (small) security risk in that there is really no limit to what goes into a cookie. If the web site programmers are sloppy or careless, their cookie could contain whatever information you’ve given them, such as your credit card number and home address.
Of course many questions spring to mind: I just placed an order online so was my credit information saved somewhere on the computer? How would I know? How do I know what goes into a cookie when I save it? Can other programs access that data?
The short answer to all of this is that you generally don’t know what’s going on on your computer and most software isn’t going to tell you. In fact, it takes determination and no small amount of expertise to reveal this type of information on an ongoing basis.
That said, there are a number of reasons not to panic. First of all, Togel Singapore casinos almost never store their client information in cookies. A few might use the Registry, as indicated by Chuck’s experience, but it’s not the norm.
Secondly, the info in cookies isn’t really a problem unless someone breaks into your computer, either physically, through your network, or via the web. As we’ve discussed in previous articles, firewalls can help minimize this risk to virtually zero so theoretically there shouldn’t be much problem.
However, if you do not want anyone, for any reason, under any reasonable circumstances to have access to your personal info then there are a few truths you need to accept: (a) personal information may or may not already be saved on your computer, you simply don’t know; (b) any time you provide that type of information to a site or piece of software it could be written to your disk; (c) that data will probably remain there until you do something to get rid of it.
Enter a whole new class of software utilities: the Cleaners. CleanDrive, Internet Cleanup, Evidence Eliminator, or my favourite Window Washer are a few of the more popular programs, but there are many more.
The cleaners work on the idea that there are a number of (relatively) predetermined places where Windows is likely to save personal data –cookie cache, certain Registry keys, etc.– and their task is to run around and zap the stored info before it can fall into the wrong hands. In other words, they’re paper shreaders for your computer. So in the grand scheme of things, the cleaners simply supplement the security measures provided by firewalls and virus scanners.
It’s worth pointing out that there is a down-side to the cleaners. For example, any user or password information that pops up automatically when you enter a site or message board will be toast if you let the cleaner purge the Internet cache. This is a typical default action. You can often tell the cleaner to save specific cookies, but you’ll have to configure that on a cookie-by-cookie basis and that can be tedious.
Most of these cleaner utilities have scheduling features that allow you to choose when they run: start-up and/or shut-down, intermittently or on a regular basis. Furthermore, while they usually have defaults that target the “predetermined places” mentioned above they are also configurable so that you can indicate specific areas of your computer that you want purged whenever the cleaner runs.
The whole thing comes down to the familiar situation where you have to balance the level of security you want against the time you’re willing to spend learning and tweaking the process. But it just might be worth it.
