Sunday, March 02, 2008

A web site to check on web sites

Sometime back in 2006, McAfee acquired a small development team that created a web application that can provide indications as to the safety of another web site. It is SiteAdvisor at http://www.siteadvisor.com/.

The first way to use it is to simply go to the site and type in the URL of the web site that you want to know more about. It gives you a status of the site: green, yellow, red, or unknown. The colors provide an indication to the safety of the site under query. Green is good, yellow may have some safety problems, and red means definite safety problems have been found. Unknown means that the site has not been checked yet.

The second, and more automated way, is to download and install a piece of software from the SiteAdvisor site. It comes in both free and pay versions. The pay version adds the ability to block suspect and dangerous sites, and can tag dangerous links in e-mails. Otherwise there doesn't seem to be any difference between the two. Both provide visual safety status of a web site on the web browser, and in search results color codes the links on the page. This allows you to keep from even visiting potentially harmful sites and possibly having spyware and other malware from infecting your system in the occasional situations where any protection you already have isn't sufficient to deal with new threats.

The one problem (and a biggy) I found is that Windows OneCare declares that the SiteAdvisor software is incompatible with OneCare and in order to return OneCare's status to green, SiteAdvisor has to be uninstalled. Since the two appear to have complementary functionality that doesn't really overlap, I hope that one of these days, OneCare will be fixed to stop complaining about this problem.

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