Firefox3 identifies "attack sites"

[Camel]

I was trying to watch a flv rip of a movie last night, but the flash player wasn't in english and didn't seek properly, so I opened up the source and identified the location of the flv file, and downloaded it directly. When I went to the URL, FF3 warned me that this was an "attack site," and linked me to a page on google's website explaining exactly why that site was blacklisted.

Is google spying on where I go, or is this just a blacklist? I'm tempted to start doing some packet logging to figure it out.


Incidentally, the movie looked better playing in VLC than it did in the flash player anyways :)

[iago]

I believe it downloads lists of dangerous sites, but I could be wrong.

To disable it, turn off the setting in the "Security" section of the settings.

[Camel]

Even assuming that the take-away was that Google's spying on me, I don't think I'd consider it a bad thing. If they are, indeed, doing this, it's unlikely that the information could be used for evil. It's not as if they'd log the POST data going back and forth when I'm banking online.

If you've spent a fair amount of time on YouTube since Google acquired it, you'll probably have noticed that the "related videos" list tends to have videos that you want to watch. They achieve this from extensive data mining and clustering. If they're data mining to increase the productivity of my search results, I say go for it. It's no secret that Google already archives every search result you ever perform against a cookie; and if you're logged in to a google account, you can even see that list, and view the data in pretty spreadsheets and graphs.

Never the less, it would be a scary prospect if they were doing that without informing users that it's happening, or giving you the opportunity not to opt-in.

[iago]

Even assuming that the take-away was that Google's spying on me, I don't think I'd consider it a bad thing. If they are, indeed, doing this, it's unlikely that the information could be used for evil. It's not as if they'd log the POST data going back and forth when I'm banking online.

I think (and I could be wrong) that it occasionally downloads a list of dangerous sites, and checks it against that local list. Therefore, they don't even know which sites you're going to.

"Evil" is a relative term, though.

If you've spent a fair amount of time on YouTube since Google acquired it, you'll probably have noticed that the "related videos" list tends to have videos that you want to watch. They achieve this from extensive data mining and clustering. If they're data mining to increase the productivity of my search results, I say go for it. It's no secret that Google already archives every search result you ever perform against a cookie; and if you're logged in to a google account, you can even see that list, and view the data in pretty spreadsheets and graphs.

I haven't noticed that, does it require that you're logged in?

I think Google archives the results against your account, which I don't have.

[Camel]

If you type "Google cookie" in to Google, you'll find over a million sites, of which the majority are propaganda sites implying that Google is evil. They claim that Google uses the cookie to track you, and that is evil. Where they are wrong is that the information they collect is not personally identifiable unless you have a Google account, and in that case, they are collecting two sets of data (one non-personally identifiable which is used for mining, and one which they use for you to see statistics about what you've searched for).

Google is using the cookie to track what you're searching, because they want their search engine to be omnipotent. If they didn't, their search results wouldn't be nearly as useful as they are, and ads wouldn't be well targeted.

[iago]

What I meant was, I don't think they customize their results based on what you commonly search for/click on (on youtube or google).

The last line I said was rushed, because I had to do something, and didn't come out right.

[rabbit]

IIRC there's some company Google uses lists from (IE: Google doesn't make the lists themselves), and all a site has to do to be put on one of those lists is NOTHING.  All anyone has to do is go to the company and say "site blah.com has viruses" and it's put on, without any sort of check.  I don't know if that's how it's still done, but that's how it was in like...beta 1 or something.

[Camel]

What I meant was, I don't think they customize their results based on what you commonly search for/click on (on youtube or google).

The last line I said was rushed, because I had to do something, and didn't come out right.

Sort of; the tracking lifecycle is one session. They use the relationship between topics established by what you search for in a single session to establish distance metrics for clustering of the information. They do the same thing against sites that are cross-linked, which is why bloggers tend to have an easier time getting a high pagerank.

[warz]

i give my life to google... they know more than i

[Camel]

When I logged in to youtube yesterday, I received a notification that I can link my youtube and google accounts (finally!), which I found to be pretty cool. It doesn't really seem to do anything that I benefit from.

[Sidoh]

When I logged in to youtube yesterday, I received a notification that I can link my youtube and google accounts (finally!), which I found to be pretty cool. It doesn't really seem to do anything that I benefit from.

Yeah, I did that too a few days ago.  I haven't noticed an difference in material, but I suppose they can recommend videos based on your Google searches or something.

[Camel]

I suppose they can recommend videos based on your Google searches or something.

Sounds scandalous.

[Sidoh]

I suppose they can recommend videos based on your Google searches or something.

Sounds scandalous.

yep.  doesn't bother me much, though.  i also haven't noticed that this is the case.  i was just throwing a guess out there.