Google Goofs On Firefox's Anti-Phishing List 168
Stephen writes "While phishing is a problem, giving one company the power to block any site that it wishes at the browser level never seemed like a good idea. Today Google blocked a host of legitimate web sites by listing mine.nu. mine.nu is available as a dynamic dns domain and anybody can claim a sub domain. All sub-domains are blocked regardless of whether phishing actually occurs on the sub-domain or not. Several Linux enthusiast sites are caught up in the net including Hostfile Ad Blocking and Berry Linux Bootable CD."
Good idea? (Score:5, Interesting)
While phishing is a problem, giving one company the power to block any site that it wishes at the browser level never seemed like a good idea
Actually, giving a single company this kind of authority is usually not a bad idea. Spamhaus and email, for example.
The issue is about trust. Even with this goofup, I trust google ( although their response to this could change that ). Hell, I trust MS here too, to a limited extent.
Re:Trust (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Trust (Score:5, Insightful)
We need to educate users to check the URL before entering anything. Any time you rely on a technological solution to a social problem you end up with woes.
Re:Trust (Score:5, Insightful)
It's just not going to happen. We like to think that "everyone" is capable of understanding what is going on when they browse the web, but that's wishful thinking.
It will be a LONG time until you can ever hope that the general public is as smart as the malicious few out there. Until then technology solutions will continue to be needed, desired and our best bet in combating this. Hell, they always will.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe, but I'm still against the false sense of security these "anti-phishing" tools provide. And although I see it may be a necessary evil, it bugs me how many legitimate sites are going to be burned by this.
Re: (Score:2)
My position is that dynamic DNS services have nothing to do with phishing and scamming. Since either way, the URL is phony, there's not much practical difference between running a fake hotmail site at http://h0tm4il.mine.ru/ [h0tm4il.mine.ru] rather than at http://24.64.197.48./ [64.197.48] There aren't many people out there who would be fooled by one but not the other.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, only the torso on which said boobies are attached. The rest of the body is not visible so we don't really know whether she's human or some alien race we haven't met before.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Trust (Score:5, Insightful)
I just had that driven home for me the other day. In my off time, I am a youth soccer coach. The website for our league has been fine for several years. Last week I visited it and got the malware warning from FireFox. I checked with the webmaster and sure enough, they had gotten hit with a SQL injection attack and had indeed gotten malware of some sort hosted on the site.
So, FWT may be a false positive - but it is at leat possible that they also got successfully attacked.
We really don't have a good system to evaluate trust on the fly due to the dynamic nature of internet content. A page that was fine 20 minutes ago may attack you now.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, giving a single company this kind of authority is usually not a bad idea. Spamhaus and email, for example.
I respectfully disagree. Giving a single, unaccountable group the effective power to completely kill some domain's e-mail is a bad idea, too. It's far too easy to game any one blacklist, and it's far too hard to get a domain that was added incorrectly (or that has been taken over by someone new who has no connection to the previous registrant) removed from the list again. I don't believe any sysadmin worth their salt filters based only on input from a single blacklist.
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, giving a single company this kind of authority is usually not a bad idea. Spamhaus and email, for example.
Here's a suggestion that might help you in future debates. If you're going to provide an example to support your argument, it shouldn't be one that proves the other side's point. Spamhaus and all email blacklists are a bunch of power hungry nerds and should never be used. Giving any single organization that much control over your Internet is just setting your self up to be abused.
Re: (Score:2)
Not an exact comparison, I grant you, although in reality that's all google is doing too; the end user is simply accepting the default behavior of "BLOCK".
Re: (Score:2)
WTF? Spamhaus doesn't charge a fee, you may be thinking of SORBS (which is widely known to be a scam racket)
Re: (Score:2)
I won't trust MS. In their IM client they block *.sytes.net and *download.php, and they have been doing it for a year. Why will this be different?
because maybe, just maybe, those are the two most common vectors for virus/scamware/etc
Get a real domain then. (Score:5, Insightful)
Granted, I can see there are opportunities for abuse here, but if the owners of dynamic dns domains don't properly police their "customers" and spammers and/or other malicious websites start using it, then Google has every right to blacklist the entire domain. Of course, it's arguable exactly how much can be done to prevent it, but if you're really concerned about not getting your site blocked, go ahead and blow the $7 a year on your own domain, or use a smaller ddns service that can actually pay attention to the nature of the hosts it's serving.
As far as having any one third party responsible for maintaining a blacklist, exactly how else do you intend to do it? You can always create your own blacklist, but that would first require you to "enjoy" the sites you would prefer get blocked automatically. You'll just have to trust someone to make that reasonable decision for you. Sure, there will be some mistakes, but that's the price you pay for protection.
-Restil
Re:Get a real domain then. (Score:4, Interesting)
Countries have been banned from sites, email, IRC channels and so on with this argument.
Just so you know, some ISPs have defacto monopolies in their countries, and everyone there get the same domain. Any idiot that say 'let ban *.il, or *.es, because I got 10 spam messages from there' should be fired on the spot.
In fact, if he works at google whoever hired him should be fired, too.
Re:Get a real domain then. (Score:5, Informative)
I don't get why you are getting annoyed that I (and probably many others) do things like this?
Re: (Score:2)
Until you happen to admin a major mail provider I couldn't care less.
Re: (Score:2)
And when he does admin a major mail provider, I'd like to sign up.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Sorry dude. I block whole netblocks that I/we don't have any business with, and that fill up my logs with annoying connection attempts, and portscans, etc. I'll show you my method for blocking about 80% of probes, scans, password guessing bots, etc:
I don't get why you are getting annoyed that I (and probably many others) do things like this?
Your rule blocks most Australian IP addresses, for starters.
Re: (Score:2)
But if you know of any Australian netblocks I've caught, please let me know.
Re: (Score:2)
Every IP address I can ever remember having falls in one of those 'ALLOCATED' blocks. In particular, 61/8, 121/8, 203/8, 210/8, and 211/8, but there are definitely more.
I guess by checking .gov.au sites and the like, you've only found organizations who jumped on the internet bandwagon pre-APNIC.
Re: (Score:2)
Could you have a look in there, and see if netblocks you know are in there?
Re: (Score:2)
That list looks pretty comprehensive, at least for the handful of ISPs I've used.
I trust you'll be adding firewall exceptions for other APNIC states such as New Zealand, right?
Nonetheless, I still think this kind of blocking is a bad idea. It relies upon an up-to-date list of netblocks, and you'll never know if a legitimate customer from a netblock you've deemed suspicious has simply taken their business elsewhere. But that's for you to worry about, not me.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Well...
wget -o /dev/null -O - http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space/ [iana.org]
He's asking IANA for the netblocks... (click the link to see what does get returned)
grep whois.apnic.net
administerd by APNIC (Asia-Pacific)
grep ALLOCATED
currently in use (not legacy ones)
cut -d " " -f 1
culling everything from each line except the IP/mask (the first item)
xargs
and strips the carriage ret
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Granted, I can see there are opportunities for abuse here, but if the owners of dynamic dns domains don't properly police their "customers" and spammers and/or other malicious websites start using it, then Google has every right to blacklist the entire domain. Of course, it's arguable exactly how much can be done to prevent it, but if you're really concerned about not getting your site blocked, go ahead and blow the $7 a year on your own domain, or use a smaller ddns service that can actually pay attention to the nature of the hosts it's serving.
Of course, .com seems even more popular for abuse. Shall we block it?
I definitely do NOT trust any single entity to make the right decision. No matter who it is or how well intentioned it starts out, eventually some combination of power trip and laziness takes over. Next thing, the standard of evidence becomes "hearsay is good enough".
For email, I take a poll of several RBLs. Anyone can land in a single RBL as collateral damage or other screwups. Landing in 3 or 4 generally indicates a real spammer.
Re: (Score:2)
oh yes, ddns providers usually check what people do with each registered domain because they don't have anything better to do.. and for your super-practical solution "pay for your domain, pay for your ssl cert, pay for..." i know a much better bush-stile-solution: unplug your fucking internet connection to stay secure and leave us alone. it is NOT normal to ban thousends of domains because someone has used the service for pishing
So you say that the blacklist maintainers should do what ddns providers don't have the time to do - because, hey, they sure don't have anything better to do?
Split it off (Score:2)
If people thing this is a useful service, split it off, or ask someone like Spamhaus to do it,and add it some more checks and balances.
Better yet, release the code to the web service, and allow any sysadmin to host the server side portion themselves, of course with the ability to update from a central list, and accept 0% - 100% of a given list as they see fit.
Block can't be bypassed... (Score:1)
<sarcasm>I feel safer already</sarcasm>
I hate that Google can do this (Score:4, Informative)
In my mind giving this power to Google is the most objectionable thing related to the company. I know somebody who has had his legitimate business ruined because Google mistakenly added his site to this list. Why? Because it was hosted on the same physical server as a truly objectionable web site.
People need to stop childishly sneering at Windows users and take their focus away from Microsoft. The terrible Goliath is clearly Google now. Even when it's not being evil it causes trouble just by being *clumsy*.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I hate that Google can do this (Score:4, Insightful)
What? How can you misunderstand everything quite so much?
No, Google doesn't filter by IP address. But because the site was hosted on the same server as a bad site it added a URL block for the innocent too. Do you see?
Secondly, the issue isn't about me using Firefox/Google. It's about customers who did and were told that the site they had browsed to was malicious. The business lost a valuable customer this way and folded.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
But how can what you're saying be true if Google blocks by domain name, not IP address? Why would Google care whether your friend's site was on the same physical server if it doesn't look at IP addresses and your friend's site had its own domain?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Redundant)
Re: (Score:2)
On a shared host it is not uncommon to have multiple domain names resolving to the same IP Address. Most web servers, like Apache, can be configured to run multiple domains. Many hosts will not give you a unique IP unless you pay extra or buy space on some variant of dedicated servers. Yahoo's [yahoo.com] hosting service, for example, does not appear to advertise a unique IP. Reseller hosting is pretty much guaranteed not to give you a unique IP.
Regardless of whether the IPs were unique however, Google could still tie
Re: (Score:2)
I don't see. How would Google determine that two sites with different domains are hosted on the same physical server, if not by IP number?
I thought they used specially trained little Google elves or something...
first time (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
What makes you think that Google will change their minds? They have automated the collection of information.
Google information for jumpbump.mine.nu:
"Of the 4329 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 0 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 09/21/2008, and suspicious content was never found on this site within the past 90 days.
Malicious software includes 7523 scripting exploit(s), 2911 trojan(s). S
Re: (Score:2)
The big reason I think they will change is the fact that they have already de-blocked mine.nu.
I think (hope) they may have placed the site on a list of sites to block only at the third-level domain not the second level. It may take time for the block list to be purged from browsers. On the other hand, My copy of Fx never got the version of the list with mine.nu included. I base the de-blocking on the removal of the warning page from clicking on the link, and the notice that the site is not currntly listed w
I've seen it happen myself dozens of times (Score:2)
Basically any site that includes a forum can get blocked if someone in the forum links to something considered malware. I actually have no idea how places like Slashdot haven't gotten blocked for that (maybe they special-case high-profile sites?), but a bunch of smaller sites with forums like ratebeer [ratebeer.com] and Gamasutra [gamasutra.com] have gotten blocked repeatedly.
Not google's fault (Score:1, Insightful)
If anyone should receive blame (which IMO they shouldn't), it's Mozilla and their blacklist.
Re:Not google's fault (Score:5, Informative)
Um, no. The list is supplied by Google. When Firefox blocks a site, press the 'Why was this site blocked?' button to see Google's warning about it (http://safebrowsing.clients.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?client=Firefox&hl=en-US&site=http://mine.nu/ [google.com] in this case).
Report Incorrect Forgery Alert (Score:1)
I dunno how much good it could do, but I suppose people could do the "Report Incorrect Forgery Alert [google.com]" thing. I'd think it really would be better if they individually added the malicious subdomains individually, rather than blocking the entire domain, which (I'd guess) contains legitimate, or at least non-harmful, sites as a majority.
(Oh, and btw, here's Google's Safe Browsing report for mine.nu [google.com].)
Everybody makes mistakes, false positives (Score:5, Insightful)
Any maintained blacklist of any reasonable size is going to end up with false positives. It's one of those things you just have to accept. People notice and report it, the entry gets removed, and we move on.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Any maintained blacklist of any reasonable size is going to end up with false positives. It's one of those things you just have to accept. People notice and report it, the entry gets removed, and we move on.
*If* the entry gets removed.
Anti-Phishing makes Firefox slow (Score:4, Interesting)
Note that the anti-phishing feature makes Firefox slow [opensuse.org] over time.
This was a dumb idea anyway (Score:5, Interesting)
Putting anti-phishing filters into browsers just shifts the responsibility of good security practices from the user to some blacklisting company. What incentive is there to be weary about suspicious sites if you can count on the almighty Google to hold your hand while you browse the Web? This makes about as much sense as someone installing parental controls in their machine and declaring that their Internet connection is now "kid-friendly."
I've never had these filters turned on, and I've never exposed my financial data to others by accident. Usually this has something to do with me hovering the mouse over links and checking the URL in the status bar.
Re: (Score:2)
"Putting spell checking into browsers just shifts the responsibility of good language practices from the user to some software company."
Just guessing what the response would be. He probably drives without a seatbelt and rides a bicycle/motorcycle without a helmet. After all, "I've never been in an accident, or lost my financial data." means you never will, right?
Re: (Score:2)
My grandmother has the same problem (she even called me saying that Firefox was broken and I later found out that she had resized the browser window) but she manages while I'm away by having books lying around about this stuff. To date I'm not aware of her exposing any unwanted details to an e-mail that looks like it came from a bank. Then again, she might not be either, but I'm assuming that it hasn't happened.
It's a dumb idea because it gives people fish instead of teaching them how to fish. It's lik
Some pain needs to be applied (Score:5, Interesting)
If you're serious about blocking phishing sites, you have to accept some collateral damage. Blocking by URL stopped working last year; most attacks have unique URLs now. Many have unique subdomains. So you have to block at the second-level domain level to be effective.
We publish a list of major domains being exploited by phishing scams. [sitetruth.com] Today, there are 46 domains listed. eBay, for example, is on the list, because eBay has an open redirector exploit. [ebay.com] Click on that URL. It says "ebay.com", right? It looks like eBay, right? It's not.
On the other hand, "tinyurl.com", which used to be popular with phishers, has been able to get off the blacklist by cracking down on misuse of their service. It's possible to do redirection competently.
When we started our list last year, it had about 175 exploited domains. After some serious nagging and an article in The Register, we're down to 46. And only 11 have been on the list for more than three months; the others come and go as exploits are reported and holes plugged. So this is a problem that can be solved.
I'm glad to see Google taking a hard line on this. It's necessary that sites that do redirection feel the pain when they accept redirects to hostile sites. Google can apply much more pain that we can. Few sites will want to be on Google's blacklist for long.
Re: (Score:2)
This line of reasoning ends only when the whole net is blocked.
Re: (Score:2)
This line of reasoning ends only when the whole net is blocked.
There are shades of gray, and you don't have to pick one of two extremes[1]. You can ban nuclear bombs without banning pocket knives, even thought they might both be weapons someone would like to own.
[1] It might not seem like that in an election year though.
Re: (Score:2)
Unfortunately, if you've got a bias to one side or another and your "shade of gray" solution is ineffective, the tendency is to keep moving towards the extreme.
Re: (Score:2)
This line of reasoning ends only when the whole net is blocked.
No. That was the conventional wisdom when we (SiteTruth) started putting out that report. We originally thought that thousands of domains might be on that list. But no. The number of well-known domains (and we're using Open Directory, which is 1.4 million or so domains, to define "well known") being exploited stays around 50 ± 25, and as previously mentioned, only 11 of them have been on the list for more than three months. It's nece
Firefox's anti-* shouldn't be enabled by default (Score:5, Interesting)
This is something that strikes me as the first time Firefox really pushed something out by default that shouldn't be. Just for one example, people who are on LTSP networks, say, 200 users, will ALL download anti-phishing, anti-malware blacklists from Google, each in their own home directory. There's no way that I know of, anyway, to share this data - SQLite seems to make it impossible. That's the first mistake in creating a compatible, light web browser.
The second mistake is enabling website blocking based on 3rd party blacklists by default. This is basically Microsoft UI thinking - "You *need* this because you don't know any better." Screw that. I mean, make it a checkbox on setup - "Use Google-provided anti-malware blacklists" Simple as that. I spent weeks trying to find out why, after just a few Firefox instances were launched on an LTSP server, none more would load - part of this was because every user logging in was trying to download the anti-malware stuff from Google, saturating the line, and preventing Firefox from loading for the first time.
I hope the Firefox devs will take all scenarios into account when making changes. It seems lame that every user needs all of the stuff in places.sqlite. And even if you argue with that, at the LEAST make it cross-DB compatible, so you can put everyone's in a nice big central MySQL database.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
"There's no way that I know of, anyway, to share this data - SQLite seems to make it impossible."
Well, I doubt it's SQLite that makes it impossible, it's more that you don't want ordinary users writing to a single shared blacklist. Because if a user can download and write good data to it, they can write bad data to it.
Suddenly all it takes is for one user to click on the dancing bunnies, and they're running a daemon without knowing it that writes bad data to the blacklist, monitors the list for changes, and
Re: (Score:2)
*snip* ...and rewrites it if any of the other users change it back to what it "should" be. That fucks things up for *everyone*, which kind of defeats the whole idea of having separate user accounts that protect everyone from each other.
I think you're misunderstanding the usage of FF's anti-phishing blacklists. Think of it as anti-virus definitions. You only need ONE copy. See http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/phishing-protection/ [mozilla.com] for more information. Downloading individual blacklists per-user would be l
Re: (Score:2)
"Think of it as anti-virus definitions. You only need ONE copy."
Yes, but how is that one copy updated? If it's not by a central daemon/service that runs even if no-one is logged in, then it has to be run by a user while they're running Firefox. If that is the case, that user needs write access to the shared database in order to write the updated definition. In which case, if you have a malicious user (or code running as a malicious user, thanks to a dancing bunnies error) who can write to the database, they
Re: (Score:2)
Never ascribe to malice ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Never ascribe to malice what can be equally ascribed to incompetence.
The corollary of this is, of course, that you should still be wary of single points of failure, even if you do not believe they will fail you on purpose.
Oh no, someone made a mistake! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Why was this blocked? (Score:4, Informative)
Safe Browsing
Diagnostic page for mine.nu/
What is the current listing status for mine.nu/?
Site is listed as suspicious - visiting this web site may harm your computer.
Part of this site was listed for suspicious activity 3 time(s) over the past 90 days.
What happened when Google visited this site?
Of the 4329 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 0 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 09/21/2008, and suspicious content was never found on this site within the past 90 days.
Malicious software includes 7523 scripting exploit(s), 2911 trojan(s). Successful infection resulted in an average of 0 new processes on the target machine.
Has this site acted as an intermediary resulting in further distribution of malware?
Over the past 90 days, mine.nu/ appeared to function as an intermediary for the infection of 183 site(s) including culportal.info, mipt.ru, baikal-discovery.ru.
Has this site hosted malware?
Yes, this site has hosted malicious software over the past 90 days. It infected 932 domain(s), including bernard-becker.com, mipt.ru, dhammasara.com.
How did this happen?
In some cases, third parties can add malicious code to legitimate sites, which would cause us to show the warning message.
Next steps:
* Return to the previous page.
* If you are the owner of this web site, you can request a review of your site using Google Webmaster Tools. More information about the review process is available in Google's Webmaster Help Center.
The real issue is about control (Score:2)
The main issue comes down to control. When something is blocked incorrectly, as it inevitably will, do you have the ability to by pass it easily? If you are the webmaster, d
I turned this off a long time ago (Score:2)
The biggest problem for me isn't the default blocking and a need for me to manually verify if I do indeed want to visit the site after seeing the warning. It's that I can't then tell it to go away. Even if I click "ignore", it'll then load the site, but it'll pop up the red block screen every single time I click on another link to another part of the site. It also throws away POST data when doing this, so I can't use search features on sites. There's no way to add an exception, like "foo.com really is OK, I
Since Gmail.com can be blocked, why not? (Score:2, Interesting)
I do not recognize any proof or intention to proof that information is harmful (to child).
Never, mind, people just use their power. Do you?
Google 'accidentally' blocks Ad-blocking site.. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
"It's not out of the ordinary for a network administrator to ban an entire domain to help secure his network."
Yes. I think this has a lot to do with Sturgeon's law: network administrators are not an exception for the 90% law.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Some years back "general network administration" made it impossible for me to see mail that came from Asia. That caused huge problems for me. The fuckwit that did this made the same argument you just did. If you are going to accept that sort of power you should learn the maxim "first, do no harm."
Re: (Score:2)
Exactly. If blocking and accepting collateral damage is to be your policy, where do you stop? Blocking whole countries? Whole ISPs? Filtering all content using protocols like Usenet or BitTorrent because some of it is probably inappropriate?
Re: (Score:2)
IME, Hotmail seems to reject almost all mail from anyone who isn't already whitelisted. Certainly every local group where I help with the IT and my own personal e-mails all get rejected by default, and the sources for those span a whole range of different ISPs and domains.
In some organisations I help, we became so bored of explaining to people with Hotmail accounts that we did send the information they asked for and it's probably in their junk e-mail store that we simply adopted a policy that if someone is
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Well, what we do is closer to blacklisting than whitelisting, it's manual and based on a specific problem for us rather than automatic and based on some arbitrary criteria set by someone else, and if Hotmail get their act together then our systems will happily play nicely with theirs without anyone changing anything on our end. But apart from being completely different, sure, it's basically the same.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1, Informative)
If you had different organizations, and a final list decided on majority, then it would be impossible for one single company to intentionally block anything.
Re: (Score:2)
And quite likely impossible for all the companies to block anything, too. Let's please stick to realistic solutions. The only companies that are going to run a site like this are Google, Yahoo, and MS. Browsers can query all three, but the most likely thing they're going to do is block something if any of the three calls it malicious.
Plus, if someone actually suggested doing that, I'd bet you'd be in here claiming it's a privacy violation faster than Bush can contradict himself. After all, you'd be sending
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Having a distributed system where individuals are responsible for rating resources (other individuals, websites, basically _anything_ with a unique ID or URI) would go a long way not just to combat phishing and malware, but other sorts of scams, trolls, etc. I call that system a "reputation system."
We need a system where I can rate a site as vapid (ie, experts-exchange is a waste of my time in search results) and then people who choose to subscribe to my ratings will see those sites may not be worth their
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Except that none of us use IE, so they could very well block the same domains in IE7's phishing filter and we'd never know it.
Re: (Score:2)
Except that none of us use IE, so they could very well block the same domains in IE7's phishing filter and we'd never know it.
While you may not use IE, some of us do. Just use the right tool for the right job.
Case and point: My online college coursework sometimes disappears if submitted using FF3. Using IE8 beta does not (and it worked fine under IE7 as well).
Yet another case and point: Flash videos under Ubuntu 8.04 with FF3 crash the browser every 4th video. FF3 under windows works without a hitch.
Re: (Score:2)
same domains in IE7's phishing filter
But here is a part of the point being made. MS's Anti-Phishing doesn't block complete domains in one whack.
URL based checking vs domain based seems a bit 'brighter' to me, and apparently with this example in the news, it is.
Re: (Score:2)
URL has been "confirmed" being "good", which sadly takes "ages" even via DSL, let alone dialup
Really, the server processes the confirmation request and sends back that byte of information over your connection slower if you are using dialup?
Wow, you are super smart, can I be your friend?
Geesh...
MS keeps its own blacklist
MS's blacklist is a community created and supported blacklist, not just a service or a list that one company can go 'bang' and kill a domain. Even MS isn't stupid enough to give themselves t
Re: (Score:2)
LOL: Dear asshole wishful thinking is not a good replacement for reality.
I assume this is something you have experienced to the point of becoming an expert?
OSS will kill Microsoft, the Desktop computer is a thing of the past, Firefox is more secure than IE7, OS X is more secure than Vista, Linux will replace Windows on the Desktop (insert year here).
Sadly even as many times as this crap is repeated on SlashDot and other publications, it still isn't true, and looks like it won't be true for a long time if ev
Re: (Score:2)
Saved me today. I visited a web page that some how turned off windows firewall before Firefox kicked in and blocked the page. First time something like that has ever happened to me, normally because I am using no-script on Linux.