Sandboxie for protected surfing and application installation

(via FreewareWiki)

When you run a program on your computer, data flows from the hard disk to the program via read operations. The data is then processed and displayed, and finally flows back from the progam to the hard disk via write operations.

. . .

For example, if you run the Freecell program to play a game, it starts by reading the previously recorded statistics, displaying and altering them as you play the game, and finally writing them back to disk for future reference.

Sandboxie changes the rules such that write operations do not make it back to your hard disk.

. . .

If you run Freecell inside the Sandboxie environment, Sandboxie reads the statistics data from the hard disk into the sandbox, to satisfy the read requested by Freecell. When the game later writes the statistics, Sandboxie intercepts this operation and directs the data to the sandbox.

If you then run Freecell without the aid of Sandboxie, the read operation would bypass the sandbox altogether, and the statistics would be retrieved from the hard disk.

A run for anything sandbox to contain your programs and limit what they can do to your system.  Sandboxie is free, and looks very, very useful.  It’s going on my system for sure.

[tags]Sandbox, Sandboxie, Virtualization[/tags]