> So the challenge for me has been to set the IE cache,
> cookies, URL history
> and typed URLs to a RAM drive so they're never written to
> disk. This would
> enable you to accept cookies for more convenient surfing
> without leaving
> traces of your comings and goings on your machine. Not even the most
> sophisticated forensics tool can re-construct your surfing
> history if it's
> never written to disk in the first place, after all.

A few basic notes here about (at least netscape and ie 4.x series, and
probably newer) browsers seem to work with cookies:
1. when you open the browser, it reads it's cookies.txt file from the
disk.
2. when you receive a cookie when browsing, the cookie is stored in memory
3. when you close the browser, all active cookies are flushed to the disk
file.

Another feature I noticed is that those browsers seem to obey the basic
dos "read-only" attribute (attrib +r <file>).

What this means is that you can mark the file read only to get much the
same effect as you are mentioning using a ramdisk for. You get cookies
until the end of your browsing session, and as soon as you close the
browser, all the cookies in it's memory are just flushed to nowhere. This
read-only method also has the bonus that you can take a single browsing
session with the file marked read-write, and get it populated with cookies
you actually might want to keep permanently; then after closing the
browser, mark the file readonly again.

--brian

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