The Meaning of the Immunization Entries

[lewisje]

I haven't found them documented well, but I think I figured all of them out...

Firefox and derivatives (like SeaMonkey and old Flock and Netscape)
everything: cookperm.txt (before Fx was released), hostperm.1 (before Fx3/Gecko 1.9), or permissions.sqlite

Internet Explorer
Cookies: cookie policy, as visible in the "Privacy" tab of Internet Options
Plugins: ActiveX Killbits, the best part of the program
everything else: Restricted Sites list, may make IE launch more slowly (but only Domains and Secure Domains are made redundant by the HOSTS file immunization)

Opera
Cookies: cookies4.dat (only detected if Opera6.ini is in same directory)
Content: urlfilter.ini (same as above), the third-best part of the program
Plugins: plugin-ignore.ini (same as above, except that %ProgramFiles%\Opera\defaults\plugin-ignore.ini is also scanned)

Global
HOSTS: the HOSTS file, usually %WinDir%\System32\etc\drivers\hosts (%WinDir%\hosts in ME or earlier), the second-best part of the program

It appears as if the immunizations for Cookies are the same across the browsers and all other immunizations for Firefox have the same lists as each other and as the HOSTS file and IE Domains and Secure Domains; then again the Restricted Sites list does allow wildcards while the HOSTS file does not, so maybe they aren't totally redundant.


I think a future version of Spybot could also immunize the adblock.ini file used by SRWare Iron in a similar manner to Opera's urlfilter.ini; unfortunately adblock.ini does not allow wildcards, so some entries would need to be tweaked, and no other derivative of Chromium offers any similar interface for external immunization...