Gilbo
Storage is cool
I'm a very, very, veeeerrrrry skeptical web browser. Even when I was using Windows I didn't acquire much malware. OTOH, I have to admit that SiteAdvisor looks to have the potential to be a very powerful service.
The Register covers the details. It looks dangerously like a PR piece, but that could only be the writer's enthusiasm for the promise of the product --which IMO is understandable. The company's technique is a logical extension of current technologies for dealing with spam, worms, and virii, but applied to websites, web-registrations, and downloads. The company sends bots all over the internet which register for everything they can, download every free piece of software out there, browse a site no-matter how much crazy javascript is sodomizing them, and click on every pop-up. They then observe the results. I can't help but get this comical image of little naive robots being slaughtered, helplessly, by the thousands as they explore the web with cheerful abondon. The bots run in Windows virtual machines running on a Linux system of course. I estimate the Windows VM's are rebooted about every 3 minutes or so
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I'm not sure how much use I, or many of you, would have for this type of software, afterall, we're not really the target audience of naive free screen-saver, 100-free-solitaire-games downloaders. OTOH I could certainly see myself installing this on the computers of people who depend on me for tech support. Then all I have to tell them is "don't click on the red links." It might be stretching the limits of their comprehension, but I think most of them just might be able to grasp it. And, yes, there's a Firefox plugin.
The power of these techniques integrated with a major search engine like google would be simply phenomenal. I could definitely see these kids getting a knock on the door from a man with a very large briefcase of cash sooner rather than later.
The Register covers the details. It looks dangerously like a PR piece, but that could only be the writer's enthusiasm for the promise of the product --which IMO is understandable. The company's technique is a logical extension of current technologies for dealing with spam, worms, and virii, but applied to websites, web-registrations, and downloads. The company sends bots all over the internet which register for everything they can, download every free piece of software out there, browse a site no-matter how much crazy javascript is sodomizing them, and click on every pop-up. They then observe the results. I can't help but get this comical image of little naive robots being slaughtered, helplessly, by the thousands as they explore the web with cheerful abondon. The bots run in Windows virtual machines running on a Linux system of course. I estimate the Windows VM's are rebooted about every 3 minutes or so
.I'm not sure how much use I, or many of you, would have for this type of software, afterall, we're not really the target audience of naive free screen-saver, 100-free-solitaire-games downloaders. OTOH I could certainly see myself installing this on the computers of people who depend on me for tech support. Then all I have to tell them is "don't click on the red links." It might be stretching the limits of their comprehension, but I think most of them just might be able to grasp it. And, yes, there's a Firefox plugin.
The power of these techniques integrated with a major search engine like google would be simply phenomenal. I could definitely see these kids getting a knock on the door from a man with a very large briefcase of cash sooner rather than later.
