Hi I am designing a site for a domestic violence organisation and have an issue that needs fixing or developing. I have never seen what I’m am proposing used before. As the user is most likely to be suffering from domestic violence they may only be able to access the computer for a shot amount of time. As you know browsers leave a history of the sites visited, data and images. These images, data etc need to be deleted from the pc so there is no trace of the site visit. The scenario is that a person is being abused and not in control of the house hold and pc. The abuser is in control of the pc and knows what is on there. (They are not a professional). But the abuser will know what has been accessed and if they find a site about domestic violence in the cache, they may use this as reason for making another attack. 1. Now the easy option is to leave instructions for the user on how to do so. (This will be done) But time consuming. 2. Also links to spywear and history deletion programs are also an option. But not the best as they will have to be installed and that aging leaves a problem of pc usage. As new programs will be noticed etc……… 3. But what I would like is a link within the site which deletes all the files and history of the site? The files can be arranged so they all have the same prefix which will make it easier to delete in the first instance and maybe this function. Is this possible? Can you do it? That’s the challenge. As this is a site for general users this will have to work on all browser platforms and both pc and mac compauters. If you have any ideas and think you can help please email me. mailto:jo@bluejam.com Yours Joachim Shotter www.bluejam.com
If the visitor is using IE, you *may* be able to write an active X control that actually could delete stuff from their computer... but I don't really like the security aspect of that either. Your best bet would be to instruct the browser not to cache anything useing HTTP headers (you'll have to look up what they are) pragma: no-cache or set the cache expire date to sometime in the past. This would do it for the actual HTTP pages and the images etc, but the visit would still be there in the browsers history of URLs browsed. Here's an idea that's occurring to me. On you page insturuct the visitor, when done, to click a link that will "mask" their visit to your site. On the back end, when they click the link, have your script set a special cookie that will tell you you have a return visitor that chose to mask their visit, and when someone from that computer comes back, you can redirect to a special page that is somehow related, but with a different angle so as not to alarm the perpetrator that his victom is investigating stuff. Maybe something rediculous like "car abuse" and talk about overworking the motor or some line like that. Back to the original visitor, the victim, tell them what will happen when they click the "mask my visit" link, and even show them the target page and have an "ad" on that page that takes you back to your original anti-abuse site. If the victim want to come back for a visit they will now know to click on the "advetisement" to go to the real site. Do that in correlation with the cache deal. It's a long shot, but it might work.
Thanks for yr suggestions. This is a hard project. Loads of other ideas using ssl. server side information have been put forward. I will get them all together and see which works best. But again thanks for the comments. Respect due
Once again, what I mentioned is not a very *clean* solution, but it could work. BTW, what do you mean by ssl server side information (SSL usually referrs to Secure Sockets Layer)