Mythtake

http://fuckmicrosoft.com/content/ms-hidden-files.shtml

Oh. My. God.

One good “debunk” deserves another, I suppose, so here we go, Point by point I hereby blow that document to smitereens.

CDWINDOWSAPPLIC~1TEMPOR~1CONTENT.IE5

The Site Says:Microsoft Internet Explorer has been logging all of the sites you have ever visited — even after you’ve cleared your history

Reality:*sigh*. IE stores the things you download from websites, including documents, pictures, flash, Java and everything to save you from downloading it again. In order to do this, it has to store *where* you got all these files from. In order to keep numbers of files in a directory (and thus time it takes to find a particuler file) to a minimum, it stores them in subdirectories. Because content.ie5 is a “Magic” folder, Windows displays it specially, in this case listing all the contents of the various subdirectories into as if it were all one directory to the user. The Index.dat is exactly what it says, and index to the cache. It can be cleared from within IE.

Conclusion: The author of the article is an overparanoid advocratic gnuvian fuckwit.

HKEY_USERS/Default/Software/Microsoft/Internet Explorer/TypedURLs/

The Site Says:[…]You will be taken to all the places you’ve typed in URLs manually.

Reality: Yes. These are there so that IE can autocomplete on the address bar. These also vanish when you clear the cache.

Conclusion: The author of the article is an overparanoid advocratic gnuvian fuckwit.

3.3. IF YOU HAVE OUTLOOK OR OUTLOOK EXPRESS INSTALLED

The Site Says:Outlook and Outlook Express has been logging all of your e-mail correspondence — even after you’ve erased them from your trash bin.

Not if you purge the trash can. And no, it doesn’t keep them forever, it just looks like it. This is because many Outlook users
don’t realise that Delete means Delete, and want a way to get things back. I recommend you don’t use O/OE anyway, because they are non-standards supporting, but they arn’t hording your mail.

Conclusion: The author of the article is an overparanoid advocratic gnuvian fuckwit.

Slack Files

The Site Says: As you may already know, deleting files only deletes the references to them, They are in fact still sitting there on your HD and can be easily recovered by anyone.

Reality: This is true, as far as it goes. What it neglects to mention is that deleting the referances means that the next time you go to put a file on the disk (by, for example, touching Windows in any way, shape, or form) and the space that the file was taking up will be replaced by the new file, destroying the previous file utterly. Basically, it works the same as putting a video tape into a “Recycle” bucket. The data is still there, but unlabled, until someone records “The A-Team” over it…

Conclusion: The author of the article can read the back of cereal packets

Microsoft utilized the desktop.ini file to make these files invisible

The Site Says: The UICLSID line cloaks the folder in both DOS and Explorer. The CLSID line disables the “FIND” utility from searching through the folder.

Reality: Well, Yes.

If you are searching for files or folders, IE’s cache is *not* what you are looking for, is it?

Conclusion: The author of the article isn’t making sense

It goes on, but I don’t. The whole thing is the kind of blind Linux advocacy and even blinder Microsoft hatred that works more against the community than for it, and worse of all, it’s bogus. Wrong, and provably so. And anybody with any reasonable amount of intellegence will work this out at some point, which reflects badly on all the valid reasons why people should use Linux/FreeBSD/Mac/Amiga/Atari or anything.

Having said that, I’m sitting here at a WinME machine (Lonecat‘s Laptop, Desire).

Yes, Lonecat is down in the Fictional Town for the weekend. And therefore I’m slightly happier.

For all those who sent me feedback on the last article, I’ll respond in the next entry.