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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.
"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.
Firefox won't stop you from deliberately installing software you're too stupid to realize is malware.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
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
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 With the shell game of staying ahead of the malware definitions, the period of time in which a site's evaluation is out of date, etc.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.
That's about the same percentage of dangerous traffic that's on the road on Friday and Saturday nights.
You fucker! From your idea was born that which is so evil, the demons of hell (Blocked: Occult) tremble; so soulless that Paris Hilton(Blocked: Entertainment) seems a better use of oxygen. So cruel and unforgiving that John McCain(Blocked: Politics) would speak out agaisnt it!
Fellow Slashdotters! May God(Blocked: Traditional Religions) have mercy on his soul! We have found he who has spawned the unholy beast that is Websense(Access Granted)!
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
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.