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5% of All Web Traffic Unsafe
OnFour writes "The MIT-backed startup behind SiteAdvisor has slapped a red "X" warning label on approximately 5 percent of all Web traffic and warned that there are roughly one billion monthly visits to Web pages that aren't safe for surfing. About 2 percent of all Web traffic was given the "yellow" caution rating." A more general SiteAdvisor blog entry overview was covered earlier on Slashdot.
Red X's are too MS for us here at Slashdot. We demand old school Mr. Yuck stickers on unsafe sites.
"roughly one billion monthly visits to Web pages " :(
OK, and the "one billion monthly visits" is clickable?
Dear god does anyone else think that is the epitomy of where you could actually post tubgirl or worse and have it not only be on topic, but insightful?
ermm
crap, I think I just justified tubgirl as insightful or interesting.
I quit.
(and no, there are NO LINKS in this comment, if for no other reason than I might end up drunk and click on one of them)
I am 31337 or something.
for safe web surfing.
To say "5% of All Web Traffic [is] Unsafe" would make the assumption that out of 100 bytes transmitted, 5 were from dangerous sites. The correct way to specify what SiteAdvisor claims would be "5% of All Web Requests From Unsafe Sites".
But this isn't to say that SiteAdvisor isn't bad. Heck, it's the best thing to happen since sliced bread, or just bread. I have a brother who is marred and has 2 kids between the ages of 12 and 15. Those kids killed his last computer, unwittingly installing all sorts of nonsense when they downloaded games and graphics. That was on a Windows 98 machine which, as hard as I tried, simply could not secure or revive from all of the trojan horses and malware that had infected it.
I've just emailed him about installing the SiteAdvisor plug-in for Firefox which is absolutely brilliant for users like my brother. Hell, I've installed it just for the novelty of it. The "Red X/Green Check" thing really turns novices more skeptical.
and 50% of web surfing is not safe for work.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Do they just mean safe for IE. At least, that is what I gather from TFA. Who cares? Just use Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, or Lynx.
---- "XML is like violence. If it doesn't fix the problem, you aren't using enough."
It is critical to understand what component is actually unsafe before any action can be taken to counter it. Likely of the 5% of "unsafe" internet traffic, 4% of it is from a perspective of sites that are not safe for MSIE. Of course there is no reason for any traffic to go to a "unsafe" site, as they do not have good content. OTOH, I could probably get away with saying that 20% of the web is useless, and not get a counter argument.
This study really only shows that most web users do not think about their safety; We already knew that considering they are using MSIE.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
I'm surprised no one is bitching that they used the color yellow in their scale since Mozilla already uses it for secured sites in the address bar.
Although this is likely true, is it really news to anyone? I'm not at all surprised that so much traffic is bad in some way: bad traffic pays.
A more interesting question is why people continue to ignore security -- could it perhaps be that security just isn't that important to anyone?
It seems that people only get upset when their bankaccount gets drained. Until then, WHATEVERRRRRR.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
For that matter, it's like the people feeding mega-doses of different things to lab rats that have been bred to be suseptable to cancer, then announcing that Yet Another Chemical Causes Cancer. You never hear about things that they couldn't manage to "prove" a carcinogen, any more than you're ever told that there's no evidence their rat experiments are relevant to humans. Sorry about the bit of a rant, there, but I do think those "researchers" need to be taken down a peg and forced to demonstrate a relationship between what they're doing and what happens in a human being.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Honestly. Why do people believe any statistics dished out nowadays?
"Safe 95% Of All Web Sites" logos on people's homepages?
sulli
RTFJ.
Many years ago on the com-priv mailing list, I posted a message "announcing" the creation of a company which would sit on your network, watching the sites that your users visited. When a "bad" site was visited, it would forge a TCP RST to close down the connection. Various categories of badness were proposed, with varying fees. I thought "This is an idea too stupid for words, so I'll put it into words so everyone can see how stupid it is." Well, I had several parties contact me for availability and pricing, because they WANTED to censor their users' browsing. I was so naive.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Set the evil bit on such traffic, so that it may be filtered out via firewalls.
I have a brother who is marred and has 2 kids between the ages of 12 and 15. Those kids killed his last computer, unwittingly installing all sorts of nonsense when they downloaded games and graphics...
Wow, wouldn't it be great if some OS allowed people to give their kids accounts with limited rights? You know so they couldn't screw up an entire install? I don't mean like what BSD, Linux or Mac can do.
Oh wait, yes I do.
What are you eating? isItVeg?.
It took them a year to do a million websites. They're taking the software downloads the sites offer and scanning them. With the shell game of staying ahead of the malware definitions, the period of time in which a site's evaluation is out of date, etc. you're going to have some obsolete data. Not that that in and of itself is vastly different from any other security measure, but really try to put yourself in j6p's shoes:
You go to a site. Ten minutes ago, the site you were on was issued a green checkmark, five minutes ago the bad guys running the site swapped out the good files for the bad, and you get an Active X popup (I said you're j6p!!). You can't trust the green checkmark. You go to a site that has a message board where some a-hole posted a link to malware, triggering a red X. They've caught it, banned him, pulled the link, and gotten the green checkmark back. But you saw the red X; and the person who's going to rip you a new one if he has to spend his weekend de-fouling your PC again told you that the red X should be a skull and crossbones and to stay the hell away from any site where you ever saw one. Now you don't know what to make of the red X.
What about a site that hasn't been scanned yet? Or whose updates have been detected but not audited? A question mark? Nothing? How long until it's just another thing the average user doesn't pay attention to? You can't have an up-to-the-millisecond read on the entire web, and you don't have any margin of error where your security mechanism is the end user knowing what to think.
Finally modding someone offtopic when they rant about what "Begging the Question" means: priceless.
Wow, wouldn't it be great if some OS allowed people to give their kids accounts with limited rights? You know so they couldn't screw up an entire install? I don't mean like what BSD, Linux or Mac can do.
Oh wait, yes I do.
Yes, and how does one "kill" a computer? The worst that you can do is corrupt your OS and force a reinstall. The grandparent post sounds like blatant astroturfing for SiteAdvisor.
In fact, the whole story does.
Are they hoping to make money off of hyping "unsafe websites" like Norton and McAfee have with "unsafe programs"?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Companies like American Express paying hackers to stick ad servers onto people's computers bring the number up to believable proportions.
It's not the sites that get you when you run a crappy Monopoly O$. They can, of course, but people who say so are more of the "blame the user" camp than people who know what they are talking about. Study after study shows M$ PCs get whacked without the user doing anything in ever decreasing times. The shortest interval, measured in the last year, is four minutes. The time to own 1/2 of "unprotected" Windoze computers is 12 minutes. Browsing questionable sites, like American Express, Home Depot, US government, porn and gambling sites, should not be dangerous but it is when you use crappy software.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
5% constitutes as a minority, and not following the crowd is cool. So, if I put a boob ob my website, can I be cool by not following the crowd?
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
Can I suck your cock, big boy?
Congrats, you're a self proclaimed smart guy with nothing to back that up. And WTF is up with comparing a GED and a BS? Totally different levels of education there first of all. Second, you a whiny bitch. Third, I'm drunk and angry so don't fuck with me. ass.
That's about the same percentage of dangerous traffic that's on the road on Friday and Saturday nights.
A lot of companies require a college degree, even when the degree has nothing to do with the position posted. My wife's company, for example, will hire someone with a music degree for an analyst position, or someone with a sports management degree as an IT administrator, but absolutely will not hire someone without a college degree.
Why do companies do this? Simple. They believe, rightly, that a college degree is a sign that a person will put themself through hell and beaurocratic bullshit to get what (depending on the degree and the job position) is just a stupid piece of paper. Companies like this because it shows that you can tolerate a certain level of bullshit in order to receive a benefit. This is something they are looking for in all new hires, because they know that their work environment can be unfun at times.
While it is admiral that you got your GED and are probably well trained for a position, your lack of a college degree (and your open disdain for their degree requirement) probably means that you would scoff at some of the silly stuff they would expect you to do on the job. If they have stupid policies, you might get into a position to work to change them, but until you are in that position you are supposed to follow the policies because they are the policies.
If you won't do that (and I assume you wouldn't), then you don't want to work for them, and they don't want to hire you.
Amazingly, their requirement for a degree exactly served its purpose, keeping you from wasting their time with your application.
An IQ test is better for eventual job performance evaluation than looking at educational background. And that only takes a couple hours, versus 4 years. It's also illegal for hiring purposes in the U.S. because the Supreme Court says IQ testing is racist towards blacks. So everyone needs 4-year degrees...
This is a great initiative to help user surfing the (insecure) webb today, I have a lot of examples of users that only click "Yes" on every website that asks to install something because if you don't do that you can't see the pr0n. Someone known anothers projects like this or this is the first?
http://www.michel.eti.br
5% of all security advisories cause ophthalmitis.
Site advisor gives it a big old green symbol. Don't worry folks, it's clear.
--
RumorsDaily
Seriously, how is this flamebait?
I didn't know it was as high as 5%, but that's one reason why I disable a lot of scripting by default and enable on a per site basis.
Many years ago on the com-priv mailing list, I posted a message "announcing" the creation of a company which would sit on your network, watching the sites that your users visited. When a "bad" site was visited, it would forge a TCP RST to close down the connection. Various categories of badness were proposed, with varying fees. I thought "This is an idea too stupid for words, so I'll put it into words so everyone can see how stupid it is." Well, I had several parties contact me for availability and pricing, because they WANTED to censor their users' browsing. I was so naïve.
http://www.siteadvisor.com/lookup/?q=www.astalavis ta.box.sk
Results 0 - 0 of 0 total results for www.astalavista.box.sk.
I'm not being condescending in any way. Many people have gotten their parents online and inevitably they download games like bridge etc. and compound that with the grandkids coming over and installing their crapware and you now have a part time job as their I.T. department. This might at least help turn it into seasona (Xmas) employment only
The last thing we need is people thinking they've got the odds on their side.
In reality, for the unsuspecting user, there is hardly a site that is safe. Almost every site uses tracking cookies that violates the original security model that only an original site will acess data about the sesion. If the 12o7 cookie exists at amazon and the fly-by-night-shady-blogger, one must assume that the safety of your amazom stored credit card informaiton is compromised. The yahoo or google toolbar should be safe, but it is now suspected that the google toolbar is collecting personal web traffic, and gathering information that might be corporate sensitive. The 5% number might represent the truly malignant websites, but those are not the problem. As in nature, the truely malignant parasites will have a hard time surviving, as many will kill the host before they spread. It is the subtle parasites, the other 95%, that will continue to cause problems if we do not educate users to wash thier hands and avoid unprotected sex. In other words, do not accept all cookies and do not faoll for a horse or a rabbit, no matte how pretty it might look.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
The thing that irks me about even filtering software is this:
There doesn't seem to be any open access to URL's to the
web sites questionable content.
Here, let me wonder aloud: Are there any lists of "dangerous"
web sites around?
In each case, one might like to confirm the risk / danger for
oneself.
TIA
5 percent? No way. Porn accounts for way more than 5 percent of internet traffic...
A-Bomb
If you look at their site analysis, you can cruise porn sites without visiting them. E.g.m /summary/
http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/dirtyplumpers.co
Scroll to where it shows the graph of connected sites. Those sites are clickable to get their analysis, so you can iterate this process.
First I'm amazed at how many of these sites are listed as having "many users".
Second, the only reason I've seen so far for branding a site red is that if you give them your email address they will send you spam.
But the truth is.. MS, and other content providers are trying to make pc's as easy to operate as a television with as little control over the content as we have over TV now. I don't care if your MS or linux or a mozilla browser user.. you have wizards upon wizards and people never have to learn anything to use the internet "have you installed Acrobat reader in Windows lately? How about yahoo toolbar, how about our photocrap suite ooobie doobie shizzle just click next". It's all about getting you hooked up to the pipe and feeding you this and that "It used to be we'd have to have some documentation in some cases actual books to use and install our programs" While a good bit of you myself included may have a clue about the internet. Computers will never be built to our skillset again "they once were to a point" Everytime I install a new program it's giving me less and less control over what I do. AVG JOE USER likes this and prays that all software is so easy and forgiving."never mind that it just put in 400,000 registry links that somehow the uninstaller will miss later" So when AJU pops into crax.fat.happy.vir.org and gets some crap popping up to install he's like sure thats fine okie dokey CLICK! We're not the target of this crap.. mom/pop/uncle joe/ is the target because they don't have to know sh!t about using a pc because they just turn it on and it works. "ala TV" I've got people at work who've thrown out 2.8ghz pc's and bought new ones because they were too slow. This isn't their fault This is because they were told how easy the internet is and just click yes if you need a plugin etc. They've either been told by a friend to go ahead or told by a relative who's the infamous son in law that knows alot about computers that it was ok. It will never get any better until MS or some other content provider type controls everything you see and do on the internet. That or we require a certain amount of training before any user gets on the net. "we need a sandbox internet for training them hehe" All you need to watch TV is a TV.. all you need for the internet is a computer.. simple right? Lets make a rule that all advertisement related to Computers explicitly state these devices are for technically knowledgeable persons and should not be bought frivously to just put up a myspace page for little suzie. Alas.. that will never happen and big biz will continue to program to people without a lick of intelligence and slashdot will be here to cry and whine and piss and moan about the lack of control we have or laugh at the peons who can't seem to keep the spyware off their machines. /end rant/reply hehe.
Inane Comments are Generously Disregarded
I say they publish a complete list of the 5% unsafe on Slashdot. Once the sites have been Slashdotted the problem should be removed and people can surf safely. Just list each site as a heading like Cool New Case Mode. The bad guys are underestimating the destructive power Slashdot wields!
Why didn't you just tell them to stop using the garbage software they were using instead? I have several friends who I've switched over. None of them have complained, and none of them ever get viruses.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
*Mothers Against Downloading Pr0n
So what does that make MS and PhD degree holders?
The MS people were willing to learn more about their field and the PhD people are just plain insane for wasting all those years, when they could have had good,well-paying jobs?
I took a look at SiteAdvisor and I actually think it'll be useful for me, as an experienced user, as well, surprisingly. I don't think I'll have much use for the red X junk, I know not to install random crap on my computer, but their analysis of downloads could be quite useful. You can pull up the list of all the modifications a program makes to your system, even for green files. If you ever wanted to know exactly what registry keys Google Desktop adds, for instance, you can just look it up.
They are using PestPatrol's database, from way before CA bought PestPatrol. It's woefully inaccurate and out of date. SiteAdvisor is an interesting idea, but worthless in its current form.
I work in a company that SiteAdvisor marked with big red "X" and I question the analysis by SiteAdvisor. For example, the SiteAdvisor claims that our site was spamming. Last time I checked, our site doesn't even take any "and I mean ANY" user info except whatever is being logged in Apache (click, hit, IP for organic traffic count). We even have corporate policy and network operation policy against sending out any smtp traffic from any of our machines without explicit end user consent (there used to be two "share with friend" and "contact support/webmaster" mailer code snippet). Matter of fact, long time ago, few smartass users found a hack for that mailer function and started to spam us and other people randomly, and since we found out, we alerted programmers and completely removed the mailer code snippet. And that was long ass time ago and no longer exists.
The funny part is that our site database doesn't even collect email address. So where does this spam comment comes from is just beyond me. Some comments even included virus and spyware!? I mean, wtf? The widgets and software are scanned twice with two different AVs and phones home for updates like RSS feed and software updates for bug fixes. How in the world does that constitute virus and spyware??? SiteAdvisor even put our site in one of their ads as "dangerous" site.
The way it looks, that 5% doesn't even sound that credible to me at this point. If you can't even get one site analysis correct, rest of their analysis would just as well be inaccurate. FYI, SiteAdvisor marked Yahoo! as safe. Some how that's funny to me in this regard.
The potential scoffing at a "silly" task has nothing to do with having a degree.
Going to flamed for this but who cares. When I was 22, I was doing nuclear reactor startups and responsible to maintain the reactor safe from an operational, maintenance, and certification prespective. At 24, I was qualified through the shutdown reactor operator and engineering watch supervisor and responsible for the entire group of people in the engineering spaces. All this while your example was living it up in college working on a musical degree.
About your comment with policies being policies.. I have found more often then not, people that do not like any feedback or questioning about why they do what they do is because they do not know why and/or have not really thought about why and they are simply passing the deed down from above and do not care why themselves. Some people consider that a good thing I guess but not all jobs are assembly line positions where the employees could probably be replaced with zombies. Instead of acting on the question and providing details, they question the questioning themselves, almost like an automatic ego defense mechanism. I have never in my life felt threatened or unsure of why I made whatever decision I made. Many of my decisions may not be the best decision and I admit it but I can explain the process I went through to determine why I did what I did and I learn from it. This could be as simple as why I went to Exxon to get gas instead of BP or why I use 34psi in my car tires instead of the suggested 30psi, neither of those choices may not be the best choice but I can explin why I made that choice. I know office politics and I know how to follow and make it in an office environment because I can play the game but it seems kind of odd that everyone that follows this trend from the top down pretends this is the best way to do business.
I getting way of topic here but this is bothering me and it relates to learning from your mistakes and thinking things through. The other day I was plowing snow with my tractor. As soon as I got on the tractor, my keys fell out of my fleece pullover pocket. I thought, wow, better check what else I have in there. I felt the pockets, found my Crackberry and I put it inside a zipped pocket and went along my business. About 5 minutes later, I saw my cell phone drop from my fleece pocket and before I could stop the tractor, I ran it over. The impact smashed the screen. I think I would have actually felt better about the situation had I not made a conscience effort clear out those "unprotected" pockets knowing stuff could fall out of there. It was more frustrating knowing I indentified a problem but still got burned by it.
Okay, it is getting real late....
Sorry, no spelchekr.
that's the same thing... you've killed it...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
That may have been true a long time ago, but is no longer.
How long have you been reading Slashdot? You must have missed this and this. And that's just in the recent past.
IIRC, at various times in the past, doing things like setting the wrong scan rate for flat panel displays for long enough periods have been known to cause hardware damage. The oldest such report I remember was from IBM, who discovered that if the heads of one of their multiplatter hard disk drives were driven in and out at a certain frequency for a long enough time, the vibrations could be transfered to the rotating media, causing head crashes. They actually patched the firmware to prevent any such periodic seeking.
... is to filter for the Evil Bit.
If the 12o7 cookie exists at amazon and the fly-by-night-shady-blogger, one must assume that the safety of your amazom stored credit card informaiton is compromised.
I don't quite understand why people rate cookies as a security risk; it is correct they are a privacy risk, but it is not like colluding web sites could not construct a different attack on your privacy.Maybe you could explain your scenario on how the shady blogger gets the credit card number?
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
I'm just glad that his wife could see past his physical disfigurement to the human being underneath - unless the accident occurred after they had kids?
'Capitalists of the world, unite! Oh
Or like Windows NT, 2000, XP, 2003 Server do (and Vista will)?
It's official. Most of you are morons.
This is great for those folks that refuse to give up Internet Exploiter(TM)(Like my Mom,Unfortunatly) Or click yes to everything--http://www.webattack.com/get/sandboxie .html
Basically I just install all their browsers into the sandbox then when they bring it back to be cleaned I can just delete the sandbox folder after backing up their bookmarks.It really does help with the ActiveX/Toolbar style crap that so many people fall for.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I have a brother who is marred and has 2 kids between the ages of 12 and 15. Those kids killed his last computer, unwittingly installing all sorts of nonsense when they downloaded games and graphics. That was on a Windows 98 machine which, as hard as I tried, simply could not secure or revive from all of the trojan horses and malware that had infected it.
Wayne_Knight (958917)
this sounds familiar...
from here:
I have a brother who is marred and has 2 kids between the ages of 12-15. Those kids killed his last computer, unwittingly installing all sorts of nonsense when they downloaded games and graphics. That was on a Win98 SP2 machine which, as hard as I tried, I simply could not secure or revive from all of the trojans and malware that had infected it.
tokengeekgrrl (105602)
I am calling astroturf on these shens.
1. Get story posted on slashdot
2. ???
3. Profit!!!
step 2? Its actually post a dupe of the story and astroturf the comments section.
Not at all -- you could have a high IQ but be irresponsible or dishonest or difficult to work with.
What's the value of a 4 year degree then?
I took a labor economics class (but was not an econ major, so take with salt), and there were two theories on this: 1) that the more education you had the more productive employee you were since you knew more and 2) that a college degree was simply a flag indicating that you are more likely to be an effective employee the more degrees you have, since getting a PhD is possible but not easy (and therefore not as likely) for a dumb or unfocused or disorganized person but much easier for a smart and/or organized focused person.
I've actually thought a lot about this and have come to the conclusion that #2 is pretty right on.
Even this is far from a perfect indicator as to what sort of employee you'll be -- but not as meaningless as intelligence alone (assuming that an IQ test is a meaninful measure of intelligence).
Hell, even in the case of working in large groups that do fairly geeky technical things being a person with whom people can get along and who is responsible is actually more useful than a smart person with a bad attitude or who is irresponsible.
For a boss in a large company (where politics are, I think, inevitable) being trustworthy or loyal might even be the single most important thing (for the boss that is -- not necessarily the company as a whole).
The vast majority of the time, IE is, quite literally, unsafe to use on the web (this includes browsers which really use IE internally, such as Maxthon). Although other browsers also have issues too, like all software, the same isn't generally true of Firefox etc.
They green-flagged a major malware site. ;)
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Are games with hidden malware comparable to trick or treat candy with poison or razor blades in them?
Hmmm, interesting. That does seem a very close match. I've never used my Foe option before (preferring to do battle with those that try to criticise), but I think I've just found a use for it.
Well caught.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Anyway you have to be careful when you surf the intrawebs now so serious. latezzz
... which is fortunate as nothing enjoyable is completely safe. It's Illegal It's Immoral Or It Makes You Fat
Reduce, reuse, cycle
"Not at all -- you could have a high IQ but be irresponsible or dishonest or difficult to work with."
I don't like arguing with stupid, but here goes: you could have a college degree but be irresponsible or dishonest or difficult to work with. What matters is that IQ is a better indicator of future job performance than a resume. Not a perfect indicator, but a better indicator, when measured.
Until recently, the biggest threat that came from such sites and downloads was bundled adware spam. Adware popups that flicked a window open where some sex-site was hoping you'd want to see some girls in a bathtub or something like that. Annoying, sure. But people simply thought that's the way the 'net works. What did they know? What do they know? All they know is that their ISP tells them that it's now so easy and cool to get on the 'net. They don't know jack about security, about adware, about spyware, about backdoors or anything else related to security. Take a look at your firewall and count the slammers and blasters still hitting it!
The threat got a new face a few months ago. Until then, those popups were annoying. Now they became dangerous. Popups laced with exploits like the WMF-problem came into existance. Adware popups became the foot into the door of people's computer security.
There have been at least 5 verified serious and wide spread attacks using this technique since December. Popups drop trojans on your computer, harvesting your paypal, ebay, amazon and banking passwords.
And this is the tip of the iceberg. We'll see more of this soon.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Why use the 'Foe' option when you can use SiteAdvisor?
I have a brother who has 2 foes between the ages of 12 and 15. Those foes married his last computer, unwittingly installing all sorts of nonsense when they downloaded games and graphics. That was on a Windows 98 machine which, as hard as I tried, simply could not secure or revive from all of the trojan horses and malware that I had infected it with.
So, install the SiteAdvisor plug-in for Firefox which is absolutely brilliant for users like my brother. Hell, I've burnt out cars just for the novelty of it. The "Red X/Green Check" thing really turns novices more skeptical.
The idea is great. Warn users about content that's unsafe. Sounds good, doesn't it? You don't have to be an IT-security expert to discriminate between "good" and "bad" webpages. So far, so good.
The fallacy starts with the question "who'll install it?". Well, who will? You will. I will. Everyone who knows about the problem will. But those who need it most won't. They don't even know that problem exists! So unless you manage to get this item into the fold of Microsoft's standard software, the tool will not make it onto the computer of those who need it worst.
But, against all odds, let's assume the tool gets to our unclued user's computer. Then he'll go to a website offering him a screensaver and the plugin will spew "WARNING!" all over the screen.
Warning?
Why?
A screensaver?
Must be an error. After all, what's dangerous about a harmless screensaver that shows me some cute and cuddly kitty pics? It's not that dreaded sex stuff that they warn me about on TV.
The whole deal is that people are just too friggin' CLUELESS to be left alone in the 'net. They're a danger to themselves and to others. Either get them off the 'net (ok, ok, I may dream... won't happen simply 'cause ISPs would run amok if they didn't have their comfortable low-bandwidth using users, not to mention the billion pages trying to sell you junk that we get (legally) for free), or educate them!
There is no technical solution for social problems!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
A DNS project that has a "blacklist" ...but that opens a whole 'nuther can o worms...
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
http://www.slashdot.org/~PlayfullyClever
http://www.playfullyclever.com/ and slashdot.html slashdot2.html on that site
for the digg fanboys out here: http://digg.com/robots/Exploiting_Slashdot:_Plagia rism_for_karma
Now I really can't think of any reason one would waste time on a project like that. If you're so anti-slashdot, then just leave it, buddy! Furthermore their complaints are pretty much bogus currently. Since the editorials on slashvertizements that cmdrtaco wrote last month, the situation improved pretty much I would say. Didn't see a dupe in a long time as well.
Anyway, I hope it won't become a habit, as it spoils the effort of people that really are interested in writing serious discussion, which is were most of us are here for anyway.
HAHAHA, Like someone can actually decide what is safe on the internet and what isn't. The uhh... level yellow B.S. made me really laugh. This, in a most American sense is what we call ,'an opinion poll', which has, to their apperant misfortune, been lobbied by the staff responsible for this rediculous blunder. If opinions are worth anything it is of an equal worth. So to this funny bit of stupidity from one of the most intelligent centers of the collegiate architecture I say ,'Pfffffft!'
Best regards,
Jerid
Research has also shown that it is lighter outdoors when the sun is up.
Try teaching 12- and 15-year-olds why they need an "account" on "their" computer and they need a "password" to protect their account from "bad things."
By the way, it's way too much work to change the current user. Buy them a used iMac for $100, upgrade the RAM for another $20, and let them not worry about that stuff.
Did that to my mom and little sister. They're as happy as they ever could be.
"All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog." Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
And this improves things over the dismal earlier versions of XP, but keep in mind that the bad guys use various exploits (e.g. popping up fake windows in front of the warnings) to force spyware installs.
sulli
RTFJ.
Technically, this story is not a dupe, because the previous story is in the related stories section. Also, I love the identical misspellings. "marred"? While, that's one way to describe having a wife...
Why don't we then just cut out the middle man and classify every site as red?!??
Is that you, Joseph McCarthy?
I guess you can only read one sentence at a time?
;)
When you finish reading the rest of my first post, get back to me
I'm sorry. I had hoped that the stupid would just go away. Since it hasn't:
.53 correlation with future job performance ratings, while education has a .22 correlation. (And the more complex a job gets, the higher the validity of cognitive test scores.) The whole of biographical data about an employee only manages a .37 correlation with job performance.
Hunter, J. E., and Hunter, R. F. 1984. Validity and utility of alternative predictors of job performance. Psychological Bull. 96:72-98
Your post is stupid not because of what you say about why employers find degrees useful, but because of a short phrase on which your entire argument rests: "not as meaningless as intelligence alone."
In fact, Hunter and Hunter found through the meta-analysis cited above that Cognitive test scores have a
In summary, it turns out that your ass is not a source of opinions of magnificent insight and perspicuity. It's a source of shit. Go away and start a blog.
Surely this is the Big Red X...
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
Have Fathers Against Pr0n issued a press release on the matter??
I have lost all faith in humanity. I hate you all.
You're right. The article should be about X% of people who are not safe for web surfing.
Right, asshole, but even if we accept that the methodology used in the '84 metastudy was flawless (hint: it isn't), there's still the problem of you assuming that an IQ test is a similarly reliable indicator of cognitive ability as the GATB as it pertains to job performance(hint: guess which one Hunter & Hunter used as evidence for their conclusions?)
One might think you haven't even read the paper.
The PA may not have meant to be ironical but Firefox is not a security solution, nor is a 'safe ISP'. Safe toolbar? pls!
Safe Web will happen with the OSCommunity creating such a safe web where vulnerabilities are quickly suffocated.
Commercial gain and evil is behind Internet vulnerabilities and thats the bottomline!!!!1
Your ass + Google still isn't a great combo. The GATB correlated at something like .9 with WAIS when Jensen tested it way back when. That's a good deal better than WAIS correlates with a lot of other IQ tests. It correlates better with WAIS than the ASVAB (which the military finds damn useful for predicting recruit performance).
The 5% they are talking about is virus/malware delivery, sites etc. I don't think anyone is ignorant enough to consider a porn site as unsafe unless you are in the heart of Bible country where 90% of the people are just plain idiots. Somehow this became a discussion of morality and porn and really it is more a discussion of malware delivery. There is no debate that malware and virus sites are unsafe so drop it. While we are on the discussion, no scientific study has ever proven porn can harm kids. The people that think this, will cover their kids eyes when 2 dogs are copulating, which I think is more against any God than just letting the kids see the dogs copulating and explaining to them that this is the process that causes baby dogs to be born. Of course only parents with real balls explain copulation to their kids, the others cover their eyes and assume any knowledge or vision of animal or human copulation is harmful. Actually, I think lack of knowledge is more harmful in any topic presented. An example is a kid who has been sexually assulted that does not even know how to describe it, or thinks it is too ashaming, to even mention. A knowledgeable kid would say, "Uncle Denny stuck his penis in my butt, will I now have a baby in my tummy?" This would alert parents of a sexual assult and they could respond by calling the police. A child that has been sheilded from knowledge may not even realize something bad has happened and will not even discuss it because it involves penises and butts, which have been forbidden to discuss and the child did what they expect during copulation exposure, which was to cover their eyes, and forget about it. Always consider that lack of knowledge is more destructive than knowledge itself!
I like to know that a candidate has had 3 semesters of calculus, a year of physics, a year of discrete math and an additional algorithms course, and has strong writing skills. All of this is relevant to the job. I don't actually care that you finished, but I don't often meet people who got that far and didn't finish.
You got a citation on that or are you just pulling facts from your peehole? Because a PsycINFO search using 'AU="Jensen" and WAIS' pulls up six hits, none of which mention GATB.
I'm way past Google, little boy. You, however, seem fond of picking information out of your textbooks. Otherwise, you know, you might actually have some relevant, up-to-date research to share, and not 20 year old highly questionable metastudies.
I'm fond of remembering what I read for a long long time. It's a great advantage in an argument with a fool. I'm aware both the problems and advantages of the Hunter metastudy. Given that this is Slashdot and we're talking IT jobs, not ditch-digging, it's the right one to cite. I believe that Jensen's Bias in Mental Testing covered the GATB data—but I don't have a copy to look it up in.
Now fuck off, AC. If you're the same AC who didn't think the GATB correlated with IQ, or the same poster who learned all he knew about this subject from an Econ course he took once upon the time, you're hopeless. I haven't heard a single interesting point yet in this thread, all that's come up is shit which I've had to wade through and waste my time disproving. Post under your own account so that I know who I'm talking to from post to post, and come up with something that proves you're "way past Google," because you sure haven't shown it.
There is no such thing as an unsafe website. If a website poses a risk, then your real problem is that your browser is treating advisory data as instructions.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I hear a lot of hot air, but you still haven't come up with a citation for the supposed 0.9 correlation of WAIS with GATB.
Conclusion: You're full of shit, and your antagonistic attitude makes that completely obvious. Just pointing that out.
95% of websites freaking suck. - Drew
The Best Damn Tech Show, Period infotechment podcast includes 3 techies talking about consumer technology, the internet
Siteadvisor was described and demoed at CodeCon in 2006. Cool stuff - they track a lot of virus and phisher sites and warn you when you're at one of them.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks