Privacy and Public Access Netscape PCs in the Library

[Alejandro Garza Gonzalez]

RE: HOW TO "erase" Nestcape's Global History after inactivity...

Use my Flute script (at the web4lib archive) and modify it to quit 
Netscape instead of making it "go home". 

You can make sure there is no global history to go back to with the 
about:global URL by simply write-protecting the netscape.hst file::

  C:\NETSCAPE> protect +r netscape.hst [enter]

..for example. You only need to do this once. In fact, we +r all of the 
files in that directory (right after installing Netscape and setting the 
bookmarks and preferences) so we can just go in there and
  
  > del *.*
  Are you sure you want to delete all files (y/n?) [y]

which gets rid of any downloads patrons may have done into that machine, 
since the default Netscape Temporal directory is the same as its 
installation directory.

**Mac users: uhm, I don't now :) Maybe if you Lock the netscape history 
file?? (We lock our preferences file in the System Folder:Preferences 
folder, haven't tried locking the History file yet...)

Hope this helps.


On Wed, 15 May 1996, Thomas Dowling wrote:

> 
> > 
> > Or you could take voting booths, which already have curtains, and use
> them.
> > They certainly offer a public kind of privacy.
> > 
>  
> Let me take this off on a tangent, since there seem to be a number of
> solutions to throw at this particular problem.
> 
> Has anyone worked up any sort of script to wipe a browser's cache and/or
> history file after a period of inactivity?  There are users, after all,
> who aren't ogling the Playmate of the Month, but are instead using Deja
> News to dig up articles on depression, or divorce, or coping when you've
> just been diagnosed with AIDS...  Whatever, there are people whose privacy
> needs go beyond not letting someone else see the screen; they may have a
> justifiable desire to make sure the next person to sit down can't just hit
> the back button a few times to see what they were reading.
> 
> (Quitting and restarting the browser does not do this.  Giving Netscape
> 3.0b2 a "URL" of about:global displays where I've been in about the last
> week.)
> 
> Thomas Dowling
> tdowling at ohiolink.edu
> 
>