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Surf safety survey

Posted on 26 Jul 2006 at 16:28

Davey Winder examines web safety tools, witnesses the demise of a promising anti-spam firm and goes ego surfing

But why should you trust Site Advisor itself? How does it gather the intelligence it presents? First, it deploys an army of automated bots to browse sites, downloading linked files, completing registration forms and then documenting the results. These are supplemented by feedback from users, comment from the website owners themselves and detailed analyses by Site Advisor staff. I'm told that sites representing more than 95% of worldwide web traffic have been tested for pop-ups, browser exploits and phishing activity; over 700,000 files downloaded, installed and checked for adware, spyware and malware; in excess of 1.6 million online forms filled in with unique addresses; and email from over 1.3 million senders tracked.

Site Advisor is free of charge for the time being and hopefully McAfee will see the value in continuing this pricing model. I've installed it on every machine I come into contact with, and at those sites where I've had the chance to monitor its usage there's no question its impact on browsing habits has been positive. Where other anti-phishing tools tend to hamper browsing speed and stability - or are simply user-unfriendly in that they don't present enough information in an easily digestible format - Site Advisor has no such flaws. I've spoken to users with ages from seven to 75 and they all instinctively trust it, know how to read it and feel safer for doing so. If I could give an award for the software product that's most advanced the cause of safer surfing (in both consumer and corporate environments), Site Advisor would get it, and as such I heartily recommend you get it too.

Family-friendly filtering

Site Advisor isn't the only safety tool I've been testing in recent months; I've also been evaluating some newly released web-filtering applications. ScanSafe has a long track record in corporate upstream web traffic filtering and enforcing usage policy, scanning three billion web requests every month as a result. Currently in beta, its Scandoo service (www.scandoo.com) brings some of this power into the consumer realm free of charge. Or that's the premise anyway: what you actually get is a basic filtering package that scrubs both Google and MSN searches against a category-based filter list of your choosing for all the usual suspects like sex and nudity, gambling, hate and discrimination and so on. When you do a search via the Scandoo interface, the results are scanned and get a green tick or a red cross depending whether they're on the list or not. The trouble is that you can still follow the link to the site in question, which rather negates the point and, although ScanSafe claims that potentially harmful sites containing malware are clearly identified with a bug icon, cross-indexing against sites flagged as dangerous by Site Advisor more often than not gave a green light. To be fair, Scandoo is still in initial beta, but it will need much more work before it becomes a tool I'd trust and find truly useful.

Not so with the second filtering tool I've been trying out. Despite its Doctor Who connotations -complete with optional barking whenever a suspect site is filtered - K9 from Blue Coat (www.k9webprotection.com) is yet another product that comes with years of experience in the corporate environment. What's truly impressive is that it remains free for non-commercial use, yet offers all the power and flexibility of the leading commercial products in the consumer web-filtering market. Anyone looking for a parental control solution would be well advised to consider this one, even those who, like me, believe that trust, education and supervision are the best solutions for controlling children's web access. K9 really does cover all bases and is suitable for protecting all age groups, not just kids. I've installed it for my 75-year-old mother, who was becoming fed up with accidentally arriving at sites with inappropriate content. I also have it on the PCs used by my six- and eight-year olds, running in full blocking mode at the moment, but as they get older it can easily be switched to a logging-only operation to maintain a trust-based approach.