Okay, I restored from an Macrium Reflect image taken just before installing BF and installed BF fresh. This time I left settings in default except I unchecked FF Site Preferences as that might upset SpywareBlaster. This time my bookmarks were left alone. My advice for what it's worth, be careful with this tool as it can be aggressive!
Instead of the magnifying glass icon I had after disabling Cortana I've now got the bloody round Cortana circle icon. I guess that means Cortana has been re-enabled. I think I've seen enough.
@Darren Williams , Your website says, "Your computer is a treasure trove of information for cyber criminals and forensics experts. It can reveal everything about you. BlackFog is able to remove this data using DoD data wiping standards and prevent it being sent to third parties." Does that mean it will wear out SSDs quicker?
Extra data being written to a SSD is not an issue, as the limited amount of writes issue that people are worried about, is nothing more than a myth. SSDs can portentially last for decades.
Mmm, maybe. Just to be sure, while I have BFP installed I have changed the setting to just one pass, same as I have CCleaner set [at default].
Well the following two articles should put your mind at ease. In the second link, they tested several drives and it took over 800TB of writes before a drive failed and some drives lasted much longer. https://www.howtogeek.com/322856/how-long-do-solid-state-drives-really-last/ https://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead
To quote Mark Twain responding to seeing his own obituary in a newspaper, “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”
BlackFog Privacy apparently doesn't block anything @ browserleaks.com and I'm yet to see it block any advertising on any site. I'm not really seeing value for money here at this point.
That's odd. Do you have any other blockers running, eg AdGuard, browser extensions etc. Here are my stats for the last three hours:
ScriptSafe [Chrome] was disabled for my test @ browserleaks.com so I disabled uBO + Privacy Badger and sure enough BFP blocked some ads and profiling + two apparent threats. Fair enough! If my extensions block stuff I guess that means there isn't anything left for BFP to block.
I didn't see this mentioned anywhere on their website before I download the trial. So what features aren't available in the Trial??
Good point @paulderdash . Found these videos which may help explain things. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0yxuXhi6NI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULifIarkQnE
I see you guys have been busy today. Let me try and answer all of them in this one post. NiteRanger: Yes we will be adding more browser cleaning if people are interested in these lesser known browsers. Regardless of what browser you use though we are still actively protecting you. The system does not use any plugins to function and works across any browser that is running. We are working at network layer 3. The predictive threat protection is behavioral based but only when you have a network connection, as that is our main focus. Version 4 is scheduled for Summer. Krusty: The trial is fully functional for 30 days and it will just popup after that with a license dialog. There are no restrictions on the trial. We can definitely switch the default for bookmarks to off, as we normally try to be less agressive. We will rectify this default today. TOR is a Dark Web browser so when the Dark Web option is on then yes it will block it by design. This is to stop C2 tunneling over this protocol. If you have a legitimate use for TOR then like you discovered, you can toggle the option.
There is one other point that I wanted to mention. It seems like everyone is using Browser plugins to do a lot of blocking for them. As mentioned, BlackFog doesn't use any plugins, and so is not restricted to just browsers, but any traffic over the network from any application. So if any piece of software tries to do something it shouldn't it will be caught.
Hi Darren, Thanks for the reply. Any reason why your program re-enables Cortana on my Windows 10 machines after I used a registry tweak to disable it? Thanks.
Hi Darren Does BFP protects during offline? It seems so according to this page https://www.blackfog.com/cyber-privacy-blog/ How does BFP achieve the offline protection? Thanks
Hi Krusty, the second set of options are system level, make sure Cortana is checked (which means disable). We turn off all its data collection etc. If it is unchecked.... the default then it might come back on if you click those settings and click OK by mistake (as it will reapply and therefore turn it back on).
Hi NiteRanger, there are a number of features that are not network related which will still be active offline, such as execution prevention. This will lockdown your machine so that exe's cannot execute from common threat locations and droppers. The Forensic/ Spyware option will also look at running processes and remove any hijacked processes like explorer and kill them off. A good example would be disabling products like Computrace. Then of course you will also have the forensic cleaning available offline as well.
Thanks for everyone's input. We have now released 3.3.2 with a few modifications as suggested. If you have it installed just select Help > Update. Otherwise you can download the new edition from our web site. Note we have removed the PS script from the installer and the Firefox bookmark removal defaults to off now. Full release notes are: - Improved icon sizing on High DPI screens - Auto upgrade for Enterprise now restarts client as needed - Updated translations - Updated Gzip libraries - Updated Cryptocurrency mining rules - Updated Advertising rules - Added Cryptocurrency mining to Network options - Added Malware to Network options - Changed Firefox “Site preferences” default to off to preserve bookmarks (thanks Krusty) - Removed Powershell config script from installer and used native installer API (thanks Peter)
Cool! Is there any way to stop being notified that BFP has cleaned my browsers after closing them? Those notifications are becoming annoying. Thanks.
