Tommie doing his part for the internet one more time.

Have you ever wondered how your lady found your collection of “hot, hot women that need the bologna pony”?

You say to yourself, “How did she find that? I never thought she would look in the C:\WINNT\system32\Microsoft\Protect\S-1-5-18\User\Driver\Home\Inft
\CDDmc\Wkndl directory.”

Or maybe your Mom stopped by and happened to hop on the Internet while you were in the shower and when you come back she has found her way to bangbus.com and is now screaming at you about how sick of an individual you are. The whole time you are thinking, "I haven't been to bangbus since Jimmy and the boys came over three weeks ago."

What about that chat you had with an old flame in Yahoo messenger. You didn't mean anything by it. You were just flirting for old times sake. You didn't know your new girl would find it. Heck, how did she even know your password?

Is this you or could it be you in the near future?

Well my friends let me tell you what you can do to prevent this kind of tragic oops. It's quite simple really. You see information assurance is my real skill and I get paid to keep information hidden. Here are some simple tips to keep you out of the digital doghouse.

The most common mistake comes from playing video files in your favorite media player. Let's take windows media player for now. What happens in media player is that it saves all the files you open and all the URLs that you go by default. I mean even if you try to bury all your good stuff in some obscure directory as long as your media player is saving that list of open files and URLs then you might as put a shortcut on your desktop that says Donkey Shlongs.

To fix this problem what you can do is in media player go to tools->Options->Privacy and then uncheck the History as well as clicking the Clear History button.

The second mistake is with Internet Explorer and Firefox but, since the average Firefox user knows how to cover tracks I'll focus on the IE user.

Let's start in Tools.

Go to tools->General and you will see a section for Temporary Internet Files. IE often times stores pages you view on the Internet for quick viewing later. That way the program doesn't have to waste time trying to load pages you frequent. This means that you can have a slew of .jpg and .gif files stored away on your computer. That can end up being a lot of titty if you aren't careful. We need to start by deleting the files. You'll have to do this every time you log off if you want to insure a clean computer, which can be a bit bothersome but the way I see it there is nothing bothersome about a clear conscience. There is nothing worse than wondering if you forgot to log off that page or if it is still in the history.

Speaking of history at the bottom of the general page what you can do is set your history for a day or so. If you surf at work (and I know you do) I would probably set my history to 0. Any pages you think you really need then you should bookmark. It takes a bit more effort but being clean is worth it.

Now then what if you have a mate that is a bit more inquisitive than that and has the knowledge that .mov is a movie file and .jpg is a picture file. It doesn't matter how deep you bury your files a basic search on the drive will pull that all up. Might I suggest WinZip my friend?

WinZip you say, what good is zipping my files my sexy Sherlock Holmes can most assuredly do a search on .zip files and find the same things and I would respond yes, this is true but...if you password protect your zip files then it makes it a bit more difficult to infiltrate your porn kingdom. At that point all you need is a strong password.

I'm sure you are asking what is a strong password and I'll tell you. A strong password is one that contains alphanumeric character A-Z, 0-9, and a special character “! @#$%^&*()”. What I would suggest is that you make not passwords but pass phrases. Take a sentence that is easy for you to remember let's say for example the sentence

I hope my wife never finds my porno collection.

This sentence is easy to remember but you might be saying this doesn't meet your criteria of a strong pass phrase and this is true so lets make some adjustments to make it one.

Ihopemywifeneverfindsmypornocollection.

This is a pretty long password in itself but it isn't strong at all. There are programs that will enter every word that it finds in the dictionary both forwards and backwards. It would take me all of 10 to 20 seconds to crack this password with the correct software. Maybe a bit longer because I left the peroid in but, not so much longer that your porn can't be raided in less than one hour. So let's add something to the mix. Let's take all the vowels and switch them to a number.

1h0p3myw1f3n3v3rf1ndsmyp0r0n0c0ll3ct10n.

Now then this password if you look at it straight on looks like gibberish to the untrained eye but since you know what you are looking for it makes sense and you have a pattern that you can remember. But this still isn't strong enough. What we will now do is change the 's' to a $.

1h0p3myw1f3n3v3rf1nd$myp0r0n0c0ll3ct10n.

This is a bit stronger but not as strong as it could be so let's take the double 'l' and change it to |and take the 't' and change it to a +

1h0p3myw1f3n3v3rf1nd$myp0r0n0c0||3c+10n.

Now then this is what I call as strong password. It appears to be total gibberish but it makes sense to you the creator. Try your own pass phrases.

At any rate that was a bit of basic Internet security for you all. I hope you enjoyed today's lesson.


Tommie Hu$tle, protecting smut one computer at a time.