Browser Tools Aim to Warn Surfers of Spyware, Spam

Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "New Web tools aim to protect surfers by flagging sites that are associated with viruses, spam or other scourges, but they sometimes disagree over whether a site is safe. From the article: 'Scandoo's service sometimes misses the mark in its efforts to flag adult content. On a recent day, it gave a green rating to the web site for Maxim Magazine's U.K. division, even though it contains nudity. It gave a red rating to the magazine's U.S. site, which contains no nudity. After an inquiry from the Online Journal, [executive Dan] Nadir said Scandoo decided to change the rating, reclassifying the U.K. site as red by default. "It was clear that it was misclassified, so we classified it correctly," Mr. Nadir said. A spokesman for Maxim Online said the discrepancy showed Scandoo's technology is "clearly broken."'"

Comments

Re:Where's the Firefox Extension for this?

[dhasenan]

Better yet, where's the one that automatically directs me to red-rated sites?

McAffee Site Advisor

[Dragoonmac]

Site Advisor is an awesome firefox plugin that not only displays whether the site you are at is currently "safe", it also puts a little green check, yello exclamation point, or red x next to popular search engine's results. If you want to see why a site got a certain rating, you can click the check/mark/x or if you're at the site, the colored bar in the bottom of your browser, to see what McAffee found out when they scanned and indexed the site.

Re:Google Safe Browsing

[Qzukk]

These are great tools, but they should add to personal judgement rather than replace it.

People seem to have left their personal judgement wherever they left their personal responsibility.

Re:Maxim?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here you go