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Google Expands Safe Browsing To Block Unwanted Downloads

Posted by timothy on from the now-you-can-turn-off-adblock dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Google today announced it is expanding its Safe Browsing service to protect users against malware that makes unexpected changes to your computer. Google says it will show a warning in Chrome whenever an attempt is made to trick you into downloading and installing such software. In the case of malware, PUA stands for Potentially Unwanted Application, which is also sometimes called Potentially Unwanted Program or PUP. In short, the broad terms encompass any downloads that the user does not want, typically because they display popups, show ads, install toolbars in the default browser, change the homepage or the search engine, run several processes in the background that slow down the PC, and so on."

3 of 106 comments (clear)

  1. Re:That would include Java then... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Find the Java Control Panel, go to advanced options, and near the bottom in miscellaneous, you can tell java not to bug you with crap ware when it updates.

  2. Block downloads with Chrome bundled by johanw · · Score: 3, Informative

    Would they also block downloads with Chrome bundled? That spyware is definitely unwanted on my system.

  3. Re:That would include Java then... by mythosaz · · Score: 3, Informative

    On Windows, from an enterprise perspective, that's not the way to do it.

    Java has moved to a set of files that go in %systemroot%\sun\java\deployment that now manages those settings.

    ...except they don't always work, and load in a race with the start of Java, causing options to be ignored half the time.