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View Full Version : Safer Searching http://stopbadware.org/


davidh
August 28th, 2006, 01:38 PM
Safer Searching

We're entering a new phase here at StopBadware.org. Google -- which is one of our partners -- is now presenting people with a warning before they visit websites that have been reported to StopBadware.org as sites that distribute badware.

http://stopbadware.org/

davidh
August 28th, 2006, 01:43 PM
Note: I did not find any statements on stopbadware.org saying that they would try to warn against sites that exploit security holes to infect computers.

So it seems that the main purpose is to warn users who INTENTIONALLY download software, as opposed to those who are attacked surreptitiously by evil or infected sites.

dh

Judy G. Russell
August 28th, 2006, 03:06 PM
I did not find any statements on stopbadware.org saying that they would try to warn against sites that exploit security holes to infect computers.That's too bad. It'd be nice if Google added that too.

davidh
August 28th, 2006, 05:27 PM
A number of recently fixed Mozilla family product bugs were javascript related:

http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/444507

To my mind this suggests it might be a good idea to run FF, etc. with javascript disabled except for one's own personal whitelisted sites. I doubt they will ever find all the javascript related bugs in Mozilla family, let alone MS IE.

In order to accomplish this, I have reinstalled the FF NOSCRIPT extension. I'm hoping that the previous problems I had with it were caused by McAfee's SiteAdvisor (which crashes FF 1.5.0.6 so badly that FF can't even start, at least on my Win 98SE.

dh

davidh
August 28th, 2006, 06:07 PM
I'm hoping that the previous problems I had with it were caused by McAfee's SiteAdvisor No such luck. NOSCRIPT still crashes FF when posting webmail in mail.yahoo.com

Of course, I don't know whether the FF extensions, FF itself, or something else in Win98SE is the root cause of this, and probably never will find out. :(

Just hope I don't get hit by some zero-day exploit.

dh

Lindsey
August 28th, 2006, 10:28 PM
To my mind this suggests it might be a good idea to run FF, etc. with javascript disabled except for one's own personal whitelisted sites.
<sigh> The Websense filter employed by my company's network strips out all Javascript except for that coming from whitelisted sites. Unfortunately, an increasing number of web sites seem to be depending on Javascript to render the pages properly . . .

--Lindsey