Comment It's a pretty poor test (Score 1) 399
I was able to get 8/8, but I'm pretty sure a naive user would have done no better than chance. I wonder who these "experts" are who did so badly.
There's really no overall strategy here. Mostly, my strategy was to find the site that was even more obviously unsafe and vote *against* it. Other times, I had outside
knowledge that a certain site was ok or not.
On question 1, they show you two pages that provide free screensavers. These are suspicious to begin with. Look at the title bar of the bad site. It contains obvious keyword spam "Download for Free screen saver screensaver." So they obviously can't be trusted, even if they don't install any spyware. So that's a vote against them. I didn't think they ok site looked very reliable either, but they also post a description for each screen saver saying that it's shareware. Seems less likely to be spyware. With spyware, everything is FREE so you get more downloads.
Question 2 was a giveaway in that it actually had fine print on the bad site saying they install popup software. Again, if I ended up on either site, I'd probably close it because I have no interest in "free" screensavers or smiley software.
The bad site for question #3 looked bogus to me. There's no real information on the front page, just a bunch of links for you to click. No file sizes, nothing but "Free free free!" The good site also looks pretty suspicious. Why would it take 15 minutes to download a tiny pinball game? And they also used exclamation points way too often. On the other hand, the presence of a forum makes them a little more likely to be legit.
For question #4, azlyrics comes up on google all the time for lyrics searches, so I'm assuming it's ok. There are no obvious hints that the other site is malicious.
I knew the bearshare and kazaa bundled badness, and I use eMule all the time. I'd never heard of blubster, but there was almost no info on the page, so I didn't trust it.
So that's my strategy - don't trust things. You should see me squinting in suspicion every time I find a new site. People will lie to you all the damn time, especially when they have something to gain.
There's really no overall strategy here. Mostly, my strategy was to find the site that was even more obviously unsafe and vote *against* it. Other times, I had outside
knowledge that a certain site was ok or not.
On question 1, they show you two pages that provide free screensavers. These are suspicious to begin with. Look at the title bar of the bad site. It contains obvious keyword spam "Download for Free screen saver screensaver." So they obviously can't be trusted, even if they don't install any spyware. So that's a vote against them. I didn't think they ok site looked very reliable either, but they also post a description for each screen saver saying that it's shareware. Seems less likely to be spyware. With spyware, everything is FREE so you get more downloads.
Question 2 was a giveaway in that it actually had fine print on the bad site saying they install popup software. Again, if I ended up on either site, I'd probably close it because I have no interest in "free" screensavers or smiley software.
The bad site for question #3 looked bogus to me. There's no real information on the front page, just a bunch of links for you to click. No file sizes, nothing but "Free free free!" The good site also looks pretty suspicious. Why would it take 15 minutes to download a tiny pinball game? And they also used exclamation points way too often. On the other hand, the presence of a forum makes them a little more likely to be legit.
For question #4, azlyrics comes up on google all the time for lyrics searches, so I'm assuming it's ok. There are no obvious hints that the other site is malicious.
I knew the bearshare and kazaa bundled badness, and I use eMule all the time. I'd never heard of blubster, but there was almost no info on the page, so I didn't trust it.
So that's my strategy - don't trust things. You should see me squinting in suspicion every time I find a new site. People will lie to you all the damn time, especially when they have something to gain.
