Internet Cleanup

Reviewed by Ted Bade

Internet Cleanup Version 5

$30 USD

System Requirements: Mac OS X 10.4.2 or higher; 80MB of free hard disk space; Universal binary.

Strengths: Easily manipulate various Internet related files.

Weaknesses: Program has some issues. Some protection features consume processor abilities and can slow down your Mac. No way to control where it looks for data, its all or nothing. Very limited documentation and help, you are on your own as to what to do with a lot of the stuff you find.

Introduction

Internet Cleanup is a suite of utilities that is designed to protect your Mac from online sources of mischief. It includes features that detect spyware, help you remove Internet-related files, block your system from advertisements, and help you search for and clean out all types of garbage. It you have concerns about security on your Mac, read on.

While some of of the functions the utilities provide could be done manually, such as cleaning out the cookies in a browser, the average user might not know where these files are or how to remove them. Using Internet Cleanup makes this a lot easier through an effective interface.

There are three areas that Internet cleanup affects. Web Browser maintenance, Privacy Protection, and System Protection. In each of these areas there are a set of utilities you can run or turn on. My experience with this program was to start by turning on everything and slowly turning off those utilities that I found get in the way.

We all have friends that insist on using Windows based machines, so we are all familiar with their complaints about how programs such as these are a lot of annoyance. On the Mac side we haven’t had to deal with this very much, since most of the malicious-ware out there doesn’t affect us. This may or may not change in the future. I would like to think that all the $%#@& computer users really like their Windows machines and won’t buy Macs, but who can tell?

Then there are all these companies trying to attract the malicious programmers to the Mac platform by offering cash prizes for figuring out how to break into Mac. Ugh! Well, I guess a company has to attract business to stay alive, lol. Let’s hope they take the cash and depart out happy universe.… In the meantime, a Mac user has to decide if they want to deal with this type of hassle in light of the fact there is so little in the way of malicious software out there for Macs. Luckily, Internet Cleanup also offers other features that one might find useful.

Internet Cleanup’s web Browser Maintenance section includes four utilities: Bookmark Manager, Cookie Finder, Internet File Finder, and Web History Finder. Each of them give the user an easy way to manipulate the items they affect.

With Bookmark manager you can sync bookmarks between various browsers. This is a great feature for people who use a variety of browsers and might not have a particular bookmark in the browser they happen to be using at the moment.

When you choose to synch the bookmarks, you can either select a particular browser as the master and sync the other browsers from that, or you can import bookmarks from each browser to all the others. Internet Cleanup will locate the browsers you have on your Mac, then display a list. You can decide if you want them or or any part of the group to participate in the sharing by clicking on or off a button and can select one account as the master.

You can also use Internet Cleanup to “validate” your bookmarks. What this means is it visits the bookmarks you have saved and checks to see if it still exists. If you don’t have a lot of time on your hands. this is a good way to weed out bookmarks that are no long valid. (Alternatively, if you have a lot of time, you can visit every bookmarks stored and see what happens! This is a lot more fun, but can take a lot of your free time.) When the program finishes a validation, you are presented with a list of bookmarks that have issues.

So instead of taking hours and hours checking all the bookmarks then deleting the bad ones, you can spend (at least in my case), hours looking at all the invalid bookmarks and evaluating them. If you just don’t care, there is an option to delete the entire list of bad ones. The result list provides a number of reasons there was an issue with the bookmarked site.

Be careful, a web site you have to log into comes up on this list even though it is still active. Don’t delete it if you plan to return! Another issue I found with this check is that if some sites don’t respond quickly enough, it says the site is invalid, when it isn’t. My suggestion is to look over the list carefully and delete only those you know are no longer needed. If you have a question, you can double click on the line with the questionable bookmarks and it will open it with your browser. Advanced settings allow you to change how long the program waits for a response as well, but some sites are just slow.

There is no way to edit the bookmarks in this list. As I went through my list, I noticed that the reason for some being bad was that the site manager had changed the name of the “index” page for some reason, or the page I had happened to save wasn’t the index page, but a sub page that was no longer valid. In those cases, it would be nice to be able to edit the bookmark to something that works, and have the program replace the invalid one with the edited one. But it you cannot do this using Internet Cleanup. You can do it manually by opening the browser and finding the offending link.

You can also use this manager to make a backup file of your bookmarks which can then later be used to restore them if some corruption occurs. When Internet Cleanup looks at the bookmarks in a browser, it makes a copy of it. This copy can later be used to restore a damaged bookmark file.

Cookie Finder isn’t a tool used by the Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster, but a utility that lets you evaluate and manipulate the cookies your browser has stored. There are only a few choices for working with Cookies. You can choose which browser to work with (or select all of them), then decide to selectively remove, remove them all, or remove only those you have used Internet Cleanup to designate as Auto Delete or any that aren’t protected.

If you want to make use of this utility, the first time you run it you need to selectively edit the list. This gives you a list of all the cookies in your browser(s). Be warned, if you have been using the browser for a long time without cleaning up cookies, this list could be very large. Then you go through the list of cookies and decide to manually delete, protect, or set them up as auto delete. Obviously you would protect those from sites you visit often where the cookies are beneficial to you. You would set as auto delete those cookies for sites you visit often and don’t want to keep them.

There is also an option to set up a particular server as auto delete or protect, so anything from it falls into the category.

Going through the list of cookies can be a real task. Unless you are a web Guru, most of the information in them will be meaningless, except for, in some cases, the name of the web site. In case it means anything to you, Internet Cleanup will show details of a cookie. You cannot edit these details. Perhaps someone can use the information in the details, but I couldn’t.

Internet File Finder locates the cache, cookies, history, and form files from all or a selected browser. From this utility, you can delete the entire file for each of these categories, or review them. I couldn’t find much use for the review process provided. When I looked at the items in my Safari cache file, they were all “documents” and the “preview” was merely a generic document icon. There was no way for me to see what the contents of that item was. I tried double-clicking on them, but this just caused the Finder to tell me it didn’t know what to do with the item either.

Other browsers don’t hide the content like Safari, so you might find an image or movie file or something else to review and/or delete.

When looking at the other files this utility gives, your only option is to delete the entire file as well. If you choose to let Internet Cleanup automatically delete certain browser files, the Advanced setting feature in this utility lets you set some options.

The final browser utility is web history finder. This one does for web history what the cookie one does for cookies. You can have it give you a history list from one or all of your browsers and selectively delete items or delete the entire list. In this case, you get a bit more information about each history entry. There is no problem in just deleting your entire history, it doesn’t affect your bookmarks, and it does get rid of files you might find useless from your hard drive as well as remove the history of where you have been with this browser.

Since history doesn’t take up a lot of space, I usually keep it around, in case I want to go back to a site I looked at a few days ago and forgot to bookmark. Where I see a lot of use for this feature is on a public access machine, where one might not want a list of the sites they visited remain after they left. Also good for teenagers to hide where they have been from their parents and vice versa! ;-)

The Privacy protection section provides utilities to clean up you IM logs, Mail, a secure delete file utility, and a file hider utility.

Users of Instant Messaging (IM) programs may or may not realize that the program can and usually does store a file of each of your messaging sessions and provides a copy of the text of that session. While this doesn’t take up a lot of space, and can be easily accessed from the Finder (if you know where to look), Internet cleanup provides easy access to these files, let’s you take a look at them and delete them.

You can have the program select a particular IM program to inspect or just look for them all. It digs through all your folders and locates the information from these sessions for you to review and delete or save as you choose. The results screen shows the application’s name for the session. If you want to review it, double-clicking on the entry opens the appropriate IM program and shows the text of the session. Now you can reminisce or delete to your hearts content.

A context pull down menu lets you do a number of things to each session or a group of them, such as delete, archive, burn to disc, or even secure delete. Advanced settings let you choose which IM programs to inspect (actually to not inspect certain ones, since the default is they are all on), and to set up things for automatic deletion if you let Internet Cleaner do this. Since Internet Cleanup looks at all drives attached to your Mac, you will see multiple copies of your chat sections if you use Time Machine or any other backup utility.

Mail Cleaner lets you locate and delete attachments to email messages. If your friends have a habit of sending you an email you want to keep and attaching a huge movie files to it (for your entertainment), this feature can be used to delete the attachment while keeping the message. You need to select which email program you want to clean from a list that includes Apple Mail, Entourage, Eudora and Thunderbird.

After the search, you get a list of attachment files and have many options for dealing with them. Such as delete, or archive. Again a lot of this can be done by simply going to the correct directory on your Mac, if you know where that directory is. Alternatively, you could simple delete all those messages with large attachments. But everyone uses their email program differently.

I had a real issue with Internet Cleanup here. First a little history. I recently had moved from using Microsoft’s Entourage as my main email program to using Apple’s Mail. I still use Entourage for appointments, especially those already scheduled that I am too lazy to move to iCal. I tried using Internet Cleanup on my Entourage folder.

For some reason, when I ran the utility, it created a new pristine mail identity, and dumped my current one. Luckily, I was able to recover most of the stuff by reloading a recent backup of my main identity. I was quite surprised something like this could happen. Technical support explained that this shouldn’t happen and did provide me with details on how to recover the lost Identity file (which I had already done). I wasn’t too happy about what had happened and so didn’t try it on my other email program!

The Secure Delete utility is very similar to what Apple’s secure delete feature does, but with slightly more options. You can select how many time the data is written over. Obviously, the more times it is over written the more difficult it would be to find the data.

It is commonly known that high end data recovery people can find data that had been zeroed out by looking for “shadow” data. This is because even though a bit is changed, nearby (and underneath) hard drive material will hold a trace of what it was before. By overwriting many times, you not only erase the bits, but alter the shadow information as well.

If you are a spy or work for a company that could be spied upon for some reason, a feature like this might be of great value. Or you might simply want to rest assured that the private information on your hard drive has been deleted for good. I have no way to test if this works, but the theory is nice.

Simple File Hider is a utility to, hide files and folders from view. It isn’t very complicated. What it does is change the file into an invisible file (or folder). While the item disappears from normal view, a search for invisible items using Spotlight easily turns it up and it can also be opened from spotlight. This feature might be nice for hiding something from your spouse, but don’t try using it on your kids, they probably already know about searching for hidden files and folders!

If you choose to use this feature, you need to set a master password. This needs to be entered to return the files to visibility later. You can also select to have the utility, which shows the files you have hidden, to automatically close after a selected amount of time. This way, if you leave your computer, prying eyes won’t be able to see what you have hidden.

The last section of utilities comes under the general heading of System Protection. Essentially it works with system wide security.

The Device Sentry utility would be a great one in an office or public access setting. Here you are required to enter an administrative password before allowing a device to be mounted on the desktop. Where I work, the IT guys have taken to turning off floppy drives and USB ports on the PCs they control. However, once in a while they need to actually use these ports, which turns out to be a major hassle for them. An application like this would be a real benefit. How it works is this, you insert a removable device, then need to type in the administrative password before the item is mounted. Pretty slick.

There isn’t much in the way of options. You can turn the feature on or off and lock the ability to turn it on or off with the administrative password. Unless you are trying to control what your kids or friends are doing with your computer, a feature like this might cause more issues then it prevents for the home user. But every situation is different.

Net Blockade serves to block a variety of different ways Internet sites can affect your Mac. It gives you the ability to control how your Mac deals with pop-ups, cookies, ads, and flash content. Some sites have links on them that refer you to another site, this is prevalent in many sites that are trying to help other sites get advertising “hits”. You can select to block these referrals.

Each section gives options for how to deal with each item. For instance, for blocking popups you can use the default, just block, but Internet Cleanup adds a “Block Aggressively” feature that I imagine works on even those sites that have figured how to get around Safari’s standard blocking feature. In the cookies section, you can reject or allow everything or permit those you have selected or alternatively reject all those you choose to reject.

In case you might need to turn these block on or off quickly, there is an advanced feature that lets you set up and activate hot keys to do this. There are some web sites that use popups for legitimate reasons. Generally they will tell you there is a need to temporarily turn off pop up blocking. Also, you might block flash content, but then visit a flash site you aren’t concerned with and want to temporarily turn blocking off. For that matter, you might want to see an ad on some site! In any case, Internet Cleanup lets you set up a keyboard combination to do this quickly.

In the advanced section, there are a number of URL bits (called patterns) and set up rules for how Net Blockade deals with them. For instance, sites ending with .edu or .gov are never blocked. Obviously, you wouldn’t want to block the content of educational or government sites. The program includes a long list of URL pieces that are know issues and has a default on how the program deals with them. You can add your own as well and I imagine that the company will issue updates as they learn more.

With Net Blockade on, when you open a web page, you will see a little “New Blockade” logo in the place where an add or animation should have appeared. This lets you see visually what is being blocked.

Network Spy Alert is a feature that prevents applications on your computer from sending data out its various data ports. There are two sections to this utility. Personal info Protector lets you protect and encrypt data that you choose, requiring a password to get access to it. The other part lets you make rules about what applications can access the Internet.

Using Personal info Protector, you first set up a password, then choose data and information you want to encrypt and protect. Obviously, you will need this password to access the data. You can also tell the application not to allow any of this information to be sent out over the Internet without use of your password.

Once you enter your password, you are presented with a variety of data you might want to enter as well as the ability to create items of your own choosing to add. By default, the data you are hiding is shown as bullets, but you can turn this on or off by using your password. If you choose to block any of this data, Internet Cleanup scans the text data that is sent from your computer for this information, and blocks transmission of any it finds.

The program control area can be turned on to prevent applications from using the Internet for anything. On the left side of the window, there is a list of common applications that use the Internet. The list starts with some generals rules for all applications, then moves onto specific applications and rules pertaining to them. The right side of the screen lists the “rules” associated with the selection. For each rule you can select the action (allow or not allow), the type of protocol that it would use, which ports or range of ports it would use, allow all or only specific internet addresses, create an expiration date for this, and finally to enable the rule or not.

It is pretty easy to edit the rules they provide by clicking on the edit button, then putting in any information you need to. For instance, the iChat default rule is shown above. It uses only one port, so you allow that port. This would prevent a virus from trying to use its ability to send data out another port. If you run an application that uses the Internet, you can set up a rule that allows it to only access one server or certain ports.

All these abilities are designed to prevent spyware or other malicious code from accessing these ports for their own dirty deeds. If you have this feature turned on, only those applications that you have given permission to will be able to use the Internet.

If you want to see what SpyAlert is doing, you can view the log it creates by opening the advanced section and clicking to read the log file. The advanced features also let you set up how the log files and blocking works.

The final feature is the SpyAlert area. this feature does a complete search of your hard drive(s) for programs that appear to be Spyware. This search take a long time. After an extensive search of my many drives it didn’t find anything. With all the downloading and testing I do, I guess this means there is very little out there at the moment.

Another issue I had with this program was that when it searches your drives, it also searches your back up drives. There is no way to tell it to leave one drive alone. What happened in my case was it found some very old iChat files that I decided to delete, just to see how it worked. When I tried to do this from the application, I got these mysterious windows that told me I didn’t have permission to delete that file.

To make a long story short, I discovered that these files were on my “Time Machine” backup drive. Data on this drive is protected by some scheme, so the window came up. The same thing happened when searching for spyware, the program spent several hours sorting through the data on my Time Machine drive.

I brought this up to their technical people. Their feelings were that the backup drive should be checked because you don’t want back ups of bad programs. They never explained how one would go about deleting the bad data if it was found! I am not sure that I agree with their philosophy on this.

Conclusion

My overall feeling about Internet Cleanup is that, for the most part, it works and works well and performs as expected. From what I can tell, it also does a good job with what it does. I am not totally sold that there is a real need for a lot of this stuff and I would rather not endure the extra processing needs of running all these utilities for the few times where it would protect me. However, if there were a lot of know issues or when those issues hit me (if they ever do), I would think differently about that.

Internet Cleanup could use a little improvement overall, but it does work and it does provide the protection it promises. If you are concerned about these issues and want the protection, you won’t go wrong with this program. If you are involved with running Macs in a business or public location, some of these features would be very beneficial.