Slashdot Mirror
Firefox 3 Antiphishing Sends Your URLs To Google
iritant writes "As we were discussing, Gran Paradiso — the latest version of Firefox — is nearing release. Gran Paradiso includes a form of malware protection that checks every URL against a known list of sites. It does so by sending each URL to Google. In other words, if people enable this feature, they get some malware protection, and Google gets a wealth of information about which sites are popular (or, for that matter, which sites should be checked for malware). Fair deal? Not to worry — the feature is disabled by default."
This isn't news. ANY anti-phishing tool that checks to see if a page is a phishing site is going to have to send it SOMEWHERE... or did you think that they were just going to be able to magically download a tiny file on your computer that would just 'know' all the phishing sites?
They all do this, which is why I don't use them. Some common sense will tell you if a site is phishing. If you try to go to a bank website and get http://bank-0-am3rika.tv/l0g0n, then you might want to reconsider putting in your username and password.
Silly sensationalism. nothing more.
If firefighters fight fire, and crimefighters fight crime, what do freedom fighters fight? - George Carlin
A "blacklist" of phishing sites needs to be stored somewhere, and you need to be able to do queries against it.
It changes too fast, and is too large, for it to be stored locally.
So SOMEBODY needs to provide a database interface to it, and unless you are willing to tolerate the voodoo cryptography and serious performance penalty to do privacy-preserving searches, how else is this supposed to be done?
Test your net with Netalyzr
Why is everyone so concerned about a company having their URL history? I mean, they already have your searches(google), your email(gmail) and your documents(google docs), what does it matter?
What will this mean? Probably that google will continue to improve their search engines, their advertising programs and other services, and they will all stay free.
Damn, go smoke some more pot, your not paranoid enough.
If sharing a song makes you a pirate, what do I have to share to be a ninja?
Fair deal? Not to worry -- the feature is disabled by default."
But does the "enable" interface inform the user that Google gets their browsing history as a side-effect of providing the blacklist?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
It seems to me that the users who most need anti-phishing protection are the ones least likely to change their defaults.
I bet we wouldn't have half the problems we do now if people just stopped automatically trusting everything they see.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
It would also help if fonts were designed a bit better. D A R N and D A M are easy to mistake in a LOT of lowercase fonts if you don't space them out: - darn dam darn dam,
Kevin Smith on Prince
The way the laws are these days, even if you're Mother Teresa, you're probably doing something illegal, even if you don't think of it as illegal or even realize it. (Ever downloaded VLC or Handbrake? Bought discount smokes? Played a little online poker? Bought something without paying your state's sales tax?) Sure, the FBI normally has bigger fish to fry than you and me, but there's no reason that'll always be the case. The tools that are used for terrorism now will be used for narcotics tomorrow, and copyright enforcement the day after that, and eventually it'll trickle down until it's being used against something you're doing. And information compiled in databases has a tendency to stick around (at least, when it's not being misplaced or stolen). Your browsing habits today could come back to seriously haunt you in a decade or two.
And it's not just the government that you have to worry about, or Google's official policy as a corporation. You also have to consider how much the people who actually deal with this data are paid. How much would it cost to get one of them to give someone malicious access to the database? A whole lot less than the database would be worth, I suspect. Even if you're not doing anything illegal (which, again, I doubt; most people break a half-dozen laws before they get to work in the morning), you're a rare person if there's not something going on in your life that you'd prefer to keep private. Medical conditions, sexual preferences
There aren't really any analogues in the pre-computer world to the size and scope of databases like Google's, in terms of both the breadth and depth of information it could contain on individuals. This is not something that we have much societal experience with, and the limited track record we do have is decidedly mixed. It's not especially paranoid to want to take a "wait and see" approach.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I am legitimately not trying to troll here.
Could Slashdot editors please have a group discussion about accuracy and integrity in journalism? First it was the WordPress piece, that was rightly amended, and now there's this. Both deal with a fear that "someone" is spying on us. Anyone who deals with computer security deals with that fear on a regular basis, but those fears should not be expressed in the journalism: Facts should.
As many have mentioned, this feature can be found in the Firefox 2.0.0.7 security tab under "Tell me if the site I'm visiting is a suspected forgery." The summary is flat-out misleading, and contains links to a general page about all Firefox 3 features (which does not mention Google in the slightest), and the entire discussion about Firefox 2 memory leaks, not the relevant posts the author seems to reference.
There literally is no "FA" to "R" in the first place, and the summary is inaccurate, not only in its facts, but because it is summarizing nothing.
This editorial behavior gives Slashdot a bad name, and moves it a step towards the irrelevancy of The National Inquirer. I've been bringing buckets of salt to take with this site in the past weeks, and would like to see these trends reversed.
Please discuss it.
(I've shut off the Karma bonus on this post, it should fly on its own merits. I'm not posting "AC," because if I'm out of line here, I'm willing to pay the price for it.)
--
Toro
That is precisely why I avoid Arial and its ilk whenever possible.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.