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Opera to Start Phoning Home?
An anonymous reader writes "Near the end of a story about Opera's determination to stay in the game: 'Earlier this week, Opera announced an addition that will keep it in step with its rivals. Johan Borg, a developer working on the browser, said Tuesday in a blog that the next edition, Opera 9.1, will include beefed up anti-phishing and anti-fraud features. Rather than simply indicate that a site is secure with a notation in the address bar, Opera 9.1 will also query Opera-owned servers for information on any site visited. Those that Opera has identifies as fraudulent will be automatically blocked by the browser.'"
Those that Opera has identifies as fraudulent will be automatically blocked by the browser.'"
Seems to recall this can lead Opera to trouble, like what happened with Spamhaus.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I relay like this idea, so long as it can be turned off. Based on my experiance with Opera so far I'd say that not only will it be able to be turned off, but that you can disable it on a server by server baises.
There's a reason I was willing to pay for Opera when it was still a commercial product. Now if only they would make a Symbian native version, the Java version has a hard time in landscape mode on my Nokia N93.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Well the fact that opera will check EVERY site someone goes to against their own server might work in theory...but does anyone really want all their web use data to be tracked by a server?
In a world of acronyms, the words are the real victims.
I'd like it even better if they shipped with it turned off, and you could turn it on if you wanted it.
Where were you when the voynix came?
Tell me what they send to their server is actually a hash of the URL with a huge salt.
If they did this then one of two things would happen.
1) Collisions where non-Phishing sites would be blocked as Phishing sites.
2) They would be able to figure out what the original site was anyway as they are the ones who created the hashes. Otherwise, they wouldn't be able to look for duplicate entries or not and the hashes wouldn't mean jack.
Everythings going to be in the clear. The only thing is to make sure that the feature is optional.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
It's the native mouse gestures,MDI tabs (I can tile them with a mouse gesture!) and excellent caching of history (I'll tell you when to reload the page dammit.. I *want* the old data) that got me.
If I used a Mac, the speed of Safari is not something I would overlook though. I would find one of those mousegesture additions (cocoa gestures or some such?) though.
eh, to each his own.
Your ISP can track everything you do. That must mean that they are abusing their position. Why get Opera to track your surfing when your ISP could do so much more efficiently?
Clever signature text goes here.
That's if they log the requests - given that they're a Norwegian company, they have some pretty tough privacy laws to content with.
I expect that it will depend on the terms and conditions in the end, and that they will say 'we will not log or use your data in a user-specific manner (not even AOL style 'user == number' obfuscation, hehe), however we may use it to compile statistics on accesses to phishing sites', which could prove quite useful in anti-phisher court trials.
It's no different to IE7 or the next version of Safari. The best way to check a website is authentic is to check the URL against a blacklist and then tell the user in big red text in a way they'd be retarded to ignore about the threat. I do think it would be better to download the blacklist to the client and resync it often however.
How do the Firefox add-ins, IE7 and Safari 3 handle anti-phishing?
1) very unlikely with a good hash or combined hashes 2) no they wouldn't, they'd try to hash every phishing site with every salt to see if it matches your hash... sure they could see if you watch specific sites, but it certainly mitigates the amount of information they can get about you, they can't know exactly all the sites you look at. If their entry are user submitted, the user submission can be done in clear text, no problem.
\u262D = \u5350
Why the hell would a Norwegian company hand anything over to the US DOJ? America can't really tell the rest of the world what to do you know, Bush just wants you to think that!
Yeah. I didn't start using it until:
1. It was free.
2. Firefox's developers pissed me off. This wasn't related to the memory leak bug, but that definitely contributed to me switching instead of just grinning and bearing it.
I blame #1 for me not discovering the greatness of Opera earlier.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Which government? Norway isn't (yet) subject to the U.S. government.
It's not phoning home. There's been a lot of idiocy about that statement lately and the phrase is starting to suffer the fate of the apostrophe: people are just using it whenever they think it might apply.
Phoning home means sending personal, identifying information back to the author of a program, usually with nefarious intent. This is a feature that uses an Opera server in a non-identifying way to determine if the site you're going to is fraudulent. Huge difference.
And you can probably turn it off. Yet another thing that you cannot do with software that is "phoning home" in the traditional definition.
Come on, folks. There's privacy and there's paranoia. I know a lot of you haven't left home in a few weeks, but try to stay in touch with reality, okay? The foil hats do nothing...