Perl spies on a sniffer

Secret Agent

Article from Issue 176/2015
Author(s):

Many Ubuntu users are blissfully unaware that the Zeitgeist daemon is shoulder surfing them and logging their desktop actions. Several Perl scripts can help sanitize the sniffer report and reveal interesting facts about a user's habits.

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.

Figure 1: Recently viewed files in the Nautilus file browser.

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

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