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NVIDIA GPUs give smut viewed incognito a second coming

Works in Chrome, specifically

         

tangor

10:38 am on Jan 12, 2016 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Canadian student hacker Evan Andersen says NVIDIA graphics cards retain content users would rather not be preserved, such as the material appearing in web pages viewed in the supposedly-private "incognito mode" offered by Google's Chrome browser.

[theregister.co.uk...]
This is a video buffer thing, specific to Chrome in private browsing mode, which keeps data in memory after session, and can show up later. Google will not fix this (per this report) so look to NVIDIA to bring out a new patch/update ... if they will.

engine

10:53 am on Jan 12, 2016 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Administrator 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



I assume that's anything, including smut. If so, that could be a privacy and security issue. Flushing the memory seems such an obvious and easy fix.

tangor

12:06 pm on Jan 12, 2016 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



That is correct, any data/site viewed is retained. But then again, The Register always goes for the lowest/crass sort of headlines. :)

Actually tested it on my NVIDIA card... this also happens on Win7 machines. Had to load Chrome and run in private mode to make it do it (about ten different attempts) ... and that makes Chrome less secure than IE, Edge or FF.

Fortunately for me, I use FF as basic, IE11 for testing, Edge to see if there's anything new in this HTML5 compliant version and avoid Chrome like the plague. :)

Note: Deleted/uninstalled Chrome after the test period. Including all residual registry and profile(s) entries as well. That was a real PITA!