The “Behind the Scenes” Blog of Pointstone Software

Total Privacy 5.5 is our most important release to date. The user interface has been polished up, support for the latest browsers have been added and some tweaks have been made to ensure full Vista compatibility. We feel Total Privacy has reached a level of maturity and features that are not yet matched by any of our current competitors.

Here are some highlights of the new version:

Ever wanted to see what privacy items where selected before performing a wash? Now you can with the introduction of the Wash page:

You can also switch between profiles right from the Wash page:

Updated interface now makes it easier to perform washes and protect your privacy with the Shredder and Wipe Free Space utilities.

New option to only delete files in temp folders older than 48 hours:

Many other improvements have been made internally which included support for Opera 9.5 and full Vista integration.

For a limited time only, we are offering a 30% discount on Total Privacy (regular price $29.95, discount price $20.96).Simply use the coupon code 30PercentDiscount at checkout for the price to apply.

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Newark, Delaware (March, 2008) — Pointstone Software, LLC. today announced the immediate availability of Total Privacy 5.5, a utility product for the Windows operating system.

Read the full press release here.

Total Privacy 5.3 was released today and includes many new features and improvements over the previous version.

One in particular for each we’ve recently received many requests is the possibility to select the number of passes and alghoritms (from 10 different ones) to wipe the disk free space.

You can select the new wipe methods on the Options, Program Settings page.

Some of the new features are:

• Support for Office 2007.
• Support for FireFox Google Toolbar History Cleaning.
• Added option to not load the privacy items details at program startup.
• Added option to delete the Windows XP Unread Mail Count.
• Added option to select the number of passes when wiping the free space.

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By popular request we’ve added a new feature to Total Privacy 5.2 to manage the Internet Explorer’s AutoComplete Forms data. You can also select which data to keep to selectively remove only the data that is not needed.

(click the screenshots for bigger images)

With the release of Total Privacy 5.2 we’ve made several modifications to the main interface. We hope you like the new colors and styling.

To see more screenshots of the new interface click here. To discuss anything related with Total Privacy (including feature requests and comments) please visit the forums.

Deleting files alone may not protect your privacy from those who are determined to uncover your personal and sensitive information and are prepared to employ more advanced file recovery methods.

To prevent this we are now including Pointstone Shredder with System Cleaner (starting from version 5.5) and Total Privacy (starting with version 5.1). Pointstone Shredder integrates with Windows® Explorer and offers the most advanced shredding methods available today to ensure that even if the underlying file system does not physically remove all remnants of your files, their contents are effectively inaccessible. You can choose to shred your files from 10 of the most sophisticated data destruction algorithms in existence to be certain that your confidential files, data and information are totally beyond recovery.

To start using Pointstone Shredder, simply right-click a file or folder and select “Pointstone Shredder”.

You will then see a message asking to confirm the file(s) deletion with Pointstone Shredder.

If you wish to modify the shredding method or any of the program’s settings click the Options button.

Confirming the file deletion with Pointstone Shredder will then display the shredding progress window that shows the current and overall file progress as well as a detailed log of the files securely deleted.

Another new feature available with Total Privacy 5.1 (and also available as a freeware utility) is a index.dat Viewer. What’s different about it is that it reads the index.dat files directly. This makes sure that what you see displayed by the program are the exact contents of the index.dat files.

What are Index.dat Files?

Index.dat are files hidden on your computer that contain all of the Web sites that you have ever visited. Every URL, cookies and browsing history is listed there. The file names and locations depend on what version of Internet Explorer you have. If you are running IE version 4.0 or above, the file name is “index.dat”.

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Today I’m going to focus on some of the new features of Total Privacy 5.1, starting with the Start Menu Click History Viewer (also known as Explorer UserAssist Data). This Viewer is available with Total Privacy (Privacy Items, Windows, Start Menu) and as a standalone freeware application.

What does the start menu click history shows? Every time you open a program from the start menu, the date and number of times you used it is stored in an encrypted database. The Start Menu Click History Viewer reads the Explorer UserAssist Data from the registry and allows you to see exactly that information is stored in this location.

When first looking at the contents of this registry key one might think they have been infected by a trojan or something. But in fact, it’s EXPLORER.EXE, a Windows system program, that writes these keys.

The above screenshot shows the contents of a system with little over 6 months that has never had any cleanup performed. There are 1103 entries including references to local files, titles of web pages, .url files in favorites, and shortcuts. There are entries for things accessed only when Windows was first installed (like drivers). This means that Windows logs this information and never deletes the log data. In addition of being a very high security risk this also bloats the registry, which fragments it, slowing Windows down.

The start menu click history can be found at the following registry key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\UserAssist

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We’ve added several new features and fixed a few minor issues in version 5.1.
The biggest changes to note are:

Pointstone Shredder. This new utility gives you direct access from Windows Explorer to securely delete files using one of the shredding algorithms included. Simply right-click on a file or folder and select “Pointstone Shredder”.

Index.dat Viewer. The index.dat Viewer reads the index.dat files directly showing you exactly what is stored in these files.

Start Menu Click History Viewer. With this viewer you can see all the information stored by Windows related to the programs and shortcuts you accessed from the start menu.

Fixed an issue that prevented removing index.dat files on some systems. Added option to hide the splash screen at program startup and support for ACDSee 8.

I’ll post a more detailed description about the Shredder, index.dat Viewer and Start Menu Click History Viewer tomorrow along with some screenshots.

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