How to completely hide your browsing history (adult or otherwise)
People always assume that to keep your browsing history hidden means deleting it or not saving it in the first place but that's slightly incorrect - you just need to think outside the box. The joy of this method is that no-body will expect to find your "real" Internet history there.
Virtual Machines are the solution
An odd solution at that, I'm not aware of anyone else who has discussed this matter. If you obtain a Virtual machine of sorts (Microsoft Virtual PC or VMWare - more on that later) and install an operating system of choice on there (Linux for example, it's free after all) then you have an entirely fresh machine for use.
Avoid being caught by using another machine, a virtual one. No longer must you worry about viruses, malware or your girlfriend discovering your Pornotube addiction
Pros
Because you're using a virtual machine it keeps whatever you're doing entirely separate of your main machine which means if another comes along and looks through your normal Internet history they will be none-the-wiser as to what you've been doing. Also you can browse *whatever* you want without fear of spyware because what would it matter if your virtual machine got spyware on it? Just reinstall and keep on trucking.
Cons
It's not infallible; the network logs will still show what you've been looking at. Also you've got the inconvenience of having to boot up a virtual machine every time you want to browse something that you want to be kept a secret.
Recommendations
I always recommend VMWare because I think it's a better product, but it's not free so if you're wishing to remain legal it's more likely that you'll want Microsoft Virtual PC. You'll also want an operating system to run on it and I recommend Ubuntu - one of the most popular Linux releases around at the moment. It's free, easy to use, easy to install and it comes with Firefox pre-installed - perfect for your needs.
Realistically you could use a Linux LiveCD (an environment that you boot to directly from a CD, meaning nothing is installed and therefore no history could ever be kept, but they're really slow and therefore totally unusable in real terms.
It's quite easy to hide your browsing history from your machine; simply do it on another. However, that second machine can be within the first. Get VMWare, install Linux on it and when you're done browsing you can close it. Next time simply resume the session and you're away. Free from the world of malware, viruses and your girlfriend discovering the secret present you'd ordered for her.
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Obtain some ram drive software and create a ramdrive of say 1GB or whatever.
Install a "sandbox" type program (eg. sandboxie.com). Configure the sandbox program to point to the ramdrive as the sandbox location.
Launch your favourite browser inside the sandbox and nothing will be written to disk, it all goes to the ramdrive.
Advantages: No info at all is written to your HDD. Possibly slightly faster browsing as the browser’s cache is in ram. Contents of ram sandbox can be quickly and unrecoverably deleted. (To simply "clear private data" on a normal system does not really delete the data - it could be undeleted from the HDD). Almost anything can be launched inside the sandbox eg audio/video players - no recently opened file history recorded to HDD there either. Launching programs inside a sandbox is not noticeably slower than normal launching. Keeps your system much safer from viruses/spyware as they too are sandboxed of course. Sandboxie has some nice features which makes it easy to copy downloaded files you DO want from the sandbox to the HDD. Ram is pretty cheap these days (2008).
Disadvantages: Can’t download files larger than the ramdrive size. At first it can be a little confusing if you don’t remember you’re operating inside a sandbox and then start looking for stuff on your HDD (stuff which is still in the ramdrive sandbox.) Unless you’re using some kind of encrypted proxy link or something? then your ISP knows exactly where you’ve been and maybe your dsl router/modem has ip logs as well so put a password on that.
Thanks.
Saw the link HIDE UR PR0N on Tuxmach and thought hey what they got. Was expecting some scripts, locations that should be cleared out.
Possibly a cron job, running a script that will go through and search all the locations were browsers store info and delete that
Better yet, in relation to this article, if your using Firefox just turn off your form auto filler thingy (thats the technical word :) ) and delete all but your passwords on exit.