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.

A point to remember

[techno-vampire]

Site Advisor is in the business of finding dangerous sites, warning you of them and possibly blocking them. It's in their best interest to call as many sites as possible unsafe, on the thinnest excuse. It's the same thing as how some anti-virus companies count every variant of a known virus as a new one, to make the number they can detect/remove as high as they can.

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.

Re:What do they mean by safe?

[sulli]

But it won't install it automatically or via an exploit (typically). Most spyware is delivered via ActiveX.

Re:A tad misleading, but SiteAdvisor is still grea

[Tezkah]

Wow, wouldn't it be great if some OS allowed people to give their kids accounts with limited rights? You know so they couldn't screw up an entire install? I don't mean like what BSD, Linux or Mac can do.

  Oh wait, yes I do.

Yes, and how does one "kill" a computer? The worst that you can do is corrupt your OS and force a reinstall. The grandparent post sounds like blatant astroturfing for SiteAdvisor.

In fact, the whole story does.

Are they hoping to make money off of hyping "unsafe websites" like Norton and McAfee have with "unsafe programs"?

SiteAdvisor isn't that accurate

[Anonymous Coward]

I work in a company that SiteAdvisor marked with big red "X" and I question the analysis by SiteAdvisor. For example, the SiteAdvisor claims that our site was spamming. Last time I checked, our site doesn't even take any "and I mean ANY" user info except whatever is being logged in Apache (click, hit, IP for organic traffic count). We even have corporate policy and network operation policy against sending out any smtp traffic from any of our machines without explicit end user consent (there used to be two "share with friend" and "contact support/webmaster" mailer code snippet). Matter of fact, long time ago, few smartass users found a hack for that mailer function and started to spam us and other people randomly, and since we found out, we alerted programmers and completely removed the mailer code snippet. And that was long ass time ago and no longer exists.

The funny part is that our site database doesn't even collect email address. So where does this spam comment comes from is just beyond me. Some comments even included virus and spyware!? I mean, wtf? The widgets and software are scanned twice with two different AVs and phones home for updates like RSS feed and software updates for bug fixes. How in the world does that constitute virus and spyware??? SiteAdvisor even put our site in one of their ads as "dangerous" site.

The way it looks, that 5% doesn't even sound that credible to me at this point. If you can't even get one site analysis correct, rest of their analysis would just as well be inaccurate. FYI, SiteAdvisor marked Yahoo! as safe. Some how that's funny to me in this regard.

Hardware isn't absolutely safe, either

[Mathinker]

Yes, and how does one "kill" a computer? The worst that you can do is corrupt your OS and force a reinstall.

That may have been true a long time ago, but is no longer.

How long have you been reading Slashdot? You must have missed this [slashdot.org] and this [slashdot.org]. And that's just in the recent past.

IIRC, at various times in the past, doing things like setting the wrong scan rate for flat panel displays for long enough periods have been known to cause hardware damage. The oldest such report I remember was from IBM, who discovered that if the heads of one of their multiplatter hard disk drives were driven in and out at a certain frequency for a long enough time, the vibrations could be transfered to the rotating media, causing head crashes. They actually patched the firmware to prevent any such periodic seeking.

Re:A tad misleading, but SiteAdvisor is still grea

[Tezkah]

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 [slashdot.org]:
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.

What they mean is this...

[CarpetShark]

The vast majority of the time, IE is, quite literally, unsafe to use on the web (this includes browsers which really use IE internally, such as Maxthon) [greatreporter.com]. Although other browsers also have issues too, like all software, the same isn't generally true of Firefox etc.

Re:define "safe"

[Sepodati]

IIRC, the first few links are prefetched. So Firefox is requesting them and caching them in case you click on the link. I don't remember if it's a feature within Google's code that causes this or something with Firefox itself. I'm sure it can be disabled, though.

---John Holmes...

Re:define "safe"

[h4rm0ny]

Ah, thank-you very much! I'd never guessed that it was in Firefox itself. It seems that Mozilla builds default to pre-fetching whatever a website tells them to, and that Google tells it to pre-fetch the top link.

Seeing as I don't like my browser silently downloading websites that I may not have visited (let alone setting cookies), I've disabled this. For anyone who is interested, enter about:config in the address bar, and set network.prefetch-next to false.