Perl spies on a sniffer
Precisely how does the Nautilus browser know which files an Ubuntu user edited recently to be able to display them in the Recent column? Figure 1, for example, lists two screenshots that I recently viewed with the Eye of Gnome (eog) photo viewer.
Nautilus and Eye of Gnome are two totally different applications that do not exchange any data, but an unofficial helper named zeitgeist runs in the Ubuntu desktop's background, greedily absorbing information about what's going on with the numerous applications running on the desktop. If you are interested, you can type
ps aux | grep zeitgeist
[...]
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