TELECOM Digest OnLine - Sorted: Two New Services Try to Warn You About Sleazy Sites

Two New Services Try to Warn You About Sleazy Sites

Monty Solomon (monty@roscom.com)
Sat, 24 Jun 2006 23:33:35 -0400

By Walter S. Mossberg

The World Wide Web is a marvelous thing. Because it exists, more
people have direct access to more knowledge than at any time in
history. But, by linking people everywhere, the Web has also spawned a
new international criminal class, and a related class of sleazy
businesses.

These creeps now find it easier than ever to defraud people, steal
their identities and blast them with unwanted or false advertising.
They use the Web as a pathway to infect computers, corrupt data and
take over others' machines.

Security software can help block this wave of woe. But it would be
better to know in advance if a Web site that comes up in a search
result, or one you arrived at through other means, is harboring
malicious software, or perpetrating scams, or generating spam and
unwanted pop-ups. It might also be nice to know if a site with an
innocuous name contains pornography, hate speech or other content that
might be offensive to you.

I've been testing two services that aim to provide such advance notice
of bad or offensive sites. The services, Scandoo and SiteAdvisor, take
different approaches to the task and offer different features. But
both instantly mark up a search-result page, and label the links that
might be dangerous.

Both services are free of charge, and each works on both Windows and
Macintosh computers, and in multiple Web browsers. On balance, I
prefer SiteAdvisor, though Scandoo has a couple of things SiteAdvisor
lacks.

http://ptech.wsj.com/archive/ptech-20060622.html

[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Programs like this, designed to protect
the average user seem like a good idea, considering how much of the
internet these days is porn or scam/spam in nature. Does anyone know
why ICANN has always steadfastly refused to consider top level domain
names of .spam , .scam , and .porn which would enable most users to
do a rather good job of filtering? PAT]

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