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Old 06-29-2008, 03:40 PM   #1 (permalink)
Hain
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Location: middle of Whywouldanyonebethere
Making Apps Portable?

The time is drawing near that I have to go home and fear the possible Customs search of all my personal data. Given this irrational paranoia, I have a new hobby: using/finding/making nearly all portable applications. The idea is, well, ideal. I have a USB drive (in my case an SD card) that contains all my sensitive programs and frequently used files: Firefox, Thunderbird, KeePass, Tor, Privoxy, TrueCrypt, instant messengers- things I don't want on my computer even if the damned thing's system is encrypted.

The reasoning behind this is more of practicality than security. If the application can run off of a USB stick, then I can plug that into any computer and work there. I like the sound of this.

So I am looking around at Portable Apps.com, liking what I see. Now I am no slouch when it comes to searching through options to find the one damned setting I need to make what I want to happen in a program. However, some apps just don't want to be contained. Aside from:
  1. finding those hard to get portable applications,
  2. making wildly detailed BAT scripts that copy and securely wipe application data,
  3. running everything in a sandbox, or
  4. rewriting source code,
What are other options?
Is there some magic setting I can do in Windows to make this happen?

((It is now I think I realize the appeal of Vista, because I think it implements something like this for all running programs.))
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