Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap (OSM)

Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap (OSM) are two popular platforms that we know. For those who haven’t heard of them here is some brief information about them. Wikipedia was formally launched on January 15, 2001 and now it’s one of the most used and famous free internet encyclopaedias. OpenStreetMap (OSM) was created 3 years later in the UK and it was inspired by the success of Wikipedia and preponderance of proprietary map data in the UK and elsewhere. OSM is basically a collaborative project to create a free editable map of the world.
There is some equalities, but there is also some inequalities between them. 

They both appear to be equally open any easy to use to the users.But there are some differences. Wikipedia contains a bigger amount of information than OSM. Also as Wikipedia is so popular everywhere and it is offering all kind of information in various fields, it is visited by million people every day , of any gender and age. On the other hand some people are not familiar or even haven't heard of OSM , like for example Google Maps and that is actually the main reason why they are avoiding using it.In my opinion OSM is really good and better than Google Maps. It is a wiki-like map that anyone in the world can edit. If a store is missing from the map, it can be added in by a store owner or even a customer ,also with OSM data a user is free to download some, or all of the map offline and this means that it's possible to use it to navigate without giving his location away to anyone at all.

Ways for finding and removing ”Super cookies”

Internet web sites often attach ‘cookies’ to your computer’s browser to help them keep track of you and your preferences when you visit their websites. ‘Cookies’  are basically messages given to your  Web browser by the Web server , the browser stores them in a text file and then send them  back to the server each time the browser requests a page from the server. In theory this is a useful connection between you and the web sites you visit. For example, the website Amazon stores your customer preferences information and history of your orders to better help you find what you want and make it easier to make your purchases.

More than half of the internet’s top web sites use a little known capability of Adobe’s Flash plug-in to track users and store information about them, but only four of them mention the so-called Flash Cookies a.k.a ”Super cookies”  in their privacy policies.

Super cookies are similar to the standard browser cookies most people are familiar with, but are stored in different locations on a user’s machine, for example, in a file used by a plug-in (Flash is the most common). This makes them harder to find and delete, especially since a browser’s built-in cookie detection process won’t remove them either. Furthermore, some super cookies have additional capabilities like regenerating regular cookies to prevent their removal by the user.

To make matters worse, removing master super cookies is much more difficult. It requires the user to dig through the file system and delete them manually an inconvenient task even for advanced users. The novice users, on the other hand, likely won’t even realize super cookies exist, let alone be able to find them.

To delete manually a super cookie, you need to navigate to the “Flash Player” directory on your computer. Use the search tool on your PC and look for the *.sol file extension.

If your default browser is Firefox you can add the Better Privacy plugin to your install and let the add-on work its magic on your LSOs (Local Shared Object, a.k.a  “Flash cookie”).

Not a fan of Flash in the first place? Don’t care about certain videos or online games? If so, just disable or full-on remove the Flash player from your computer. If it works for iPhone users, it might work for you, too.

Adobe has a tool that you can use to update your settings quickly and easily by going to http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager03.html and setting the “Global Storage Settings” to “Zero”. This will prevent new flash cookies from being put on your computer, but if you have any right now you’ll still have to remove them as described in the first two steps.

 

 

Sources:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/betterprivacy/