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.

Comments

A point to remember

[techno-vampire]

Site Advisor is in the business of finding dangerous sites, warning you of them and possibly blocking them. It's in their best interest to call as many sites as possible unsafe, on the thinnest excuse. It's the same thing as how some anti-virus companies count every variant of a known virus as a new one, to make the number they can detect/remove as high as they can.

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.

Re:A tad misleading, but SiteAdvisor is still grea

[Tezkah]

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"?

Re:A tad misleading, but SiteAdvisor is still grea

[Tezkah]

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.

Re:define "safe"

[h4rm0ny]

Ah, thank-you very much! I'd never guessed that it was in Firefox itself. It seems that Mozilla builds default to pre-fetching whatever a website tells them to, and that Google tells it to pre-fetch the top link.

Seeing as I don't like my browser silently downloading websites that I may not have visited (let alone setting cookies), I've disabled this. For anyone who is interested, enter about:config in the address bar, and set network.prefetch-next to false.