Antiphishing toolbar for Firefox released

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Read the EULA properly

Have any of you dorks slagging off NetCraft actually heard of the company or used the anti-phishing toolbar? No, well why would that stop you commenting?

I have used the Netcraft website for a number of years - it is very useful, as it logs information about what all the websites on the internet are running. (Yes archae0, that is why it was scanning your site - it was, to the best of my knowlege, purely information gathering.)

You can go and find out what operating system and server software that a particular site is hosted on, and often what the uptime is. Which is great for getting facts about Linux vs. Windows uptime, and settling the misinformation debates that usually occur on Talkback.

Check out this page for example:
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2005/05/01/may_2005_web_server_survey.html

As for the toolbar, I installed it on IE when it came out, and installed it on Firefox on Wednesday. I have never seen it pop-up anything, or hijack the browser in any way - it purely provides information.

Where your confusion comes from it that the toolbar provides links buttons to pages on the Netcraft website. These pages provide more information and stats about the site that you may be worried about. It is these pages that contain the banner ads. But those pages only come up when you specifically ask for them.

I can see how you misinterpreted the EULA, but you've read it wrong. The Privacy policy on the EULA states that the policy applies to the Web Sites and the Toolbar. If you were to scroll down far enough, you'd find the section that states exactly what the toolbar does. Which is this:

"The Netcraft Toolbar

The Toolbar collects the following information:

* A unique identification reference is generated for each Toolbar installation. This is sent back to us when the Toolbar attempts to download updated versions of its software and is used for planning and licensing purposes. This is not sent as part of the Toolbar's normal operation when browsing the web.

* Web sites (not URLs) visited when browsing the web. These are used to provide contextual reports and popularity ranking information for the site being browsed.

* Secure hashes of URLs visited when browsing the web. These are used to defend against phishing sites by comparing the hash against a list of hashes of previously reported phishing URLs and blocking the page if a match is found. There is no other case in which we can determine the URL of the page you have visited from the hash which we receive.

* The Toolbar does not collect any personal information except that described above. In particular, we do not collect personal information which can identify the browsing habits of individual users."

There you go. Always useful to read things properly.

You guys are free to put the toolbar in the trashcan, but I think you'd be throwing away a really useful and powerful security tool, as well as one that is pretty damn interesting.

Regards
david

Posted by: David Hamilton   Posted on: 05/27/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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