Clearing Browser's history (WAS: Privacy ...)

[George Jenkins]

To clean up Netscape's (v1.1) multitude of *.MOZ history files, I have the
following command at the end of my autoexec.bat file:

del c:\temp\*.moz

This seems to have worked beautifully for many months, as I haven't had any
problems.  Obviously, I'm using an Windows and MS-DOS (v6.22) machine with
Windows 3.11.

George Jenkins
Business Information Analyst
Harvard Business School
GJenkins at hbs.edu
-----------
At 05:31 PM 5/16/96 -0700, you wrote:
>At 14:51 15.05.1996 -0700, T.Dowling wrote:
>
>>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.
>
>Well, I don't know how to do it while the browser is running, however,
>under Win95 there are 2 ways to clear the history (I am talking
>about the box that opens up after you click on the down arrow next
>to the LOCATION field):
>
>1) you set up a user "public" or whatever, make all the settings
> in all the applications the user runs and then you copy the 
>user's user.dat into a safe place, because all the configurable 
>stuff as well as the history is kept in each user's user.dat
>in $windows/profiles/user. (Take care of the file attributes,
>user.dat is a hidden, read-only file!)
>Each time at bootup you restore the user.dat
>You inform users to reboot the computer before leaving in order
>to "clear it up".
>This is how I keep all the settings ok - and it makes it easy for
>non-technical staff to deal with screwed up configuration by simply
>rebooting. 
>2) you export the netscape part of the registry into a text file,
>then you look for the settings you want to keep (like homepage
>location, history URLs etc.) You adjust all these settings to
>the desired value. Save the file with a .reg-extension - if you 
>double-click it, it will be imported into the registry. As an
>alternative, you can import it at bootup with a command in your
>autoexec.bat.
>
>Uli
>--
>Ulrich Babiak             |       Buero  ubabiak at stbib-koeln.de   
>Dipl.-Netzer :-)          |       privat ubabiak at dom.de
>StadtBibliothek Koeln     |       http://www.dom.de/FreiRaum/uli/ub.html
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