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Please for the love of god do not disable the Google SafeBrowsing preferences. SafeBrowsing protects you from a lot of malicious websites, and does not leak muc

Please for the love of god do not disable the Google SafeBrowsing preferences. SafeBrowsing protects you from a lot of malicious websites, and does not leak much information to Google. For most people the security benefits of SafeBrowsing far outweigh the privacy concerns. I would never disable it for my mom, or any non technical friends. But I would hope the majority of HN users are pretty good at spotting, and steering clear of malicious websites.

ygjb 11y ago
Safebrowsing protects you from more than tricky websites - it blocks sites and services that are known to serve malware. It doesn't matter how clever a user you are, if your browser (doesn't matter which one) navigates to a site that hosts malicious code that targets an unpatched vulnerability, you're hosed.
RubyPinch 11y ago
sure, you might not click on an advert or the such, but XSS isn't exactly visible, along with a whole host of other problems
magicalist 11y ago
> But I would hope the majority of HN users are pretty good at spotting, and steering clear of malicious websites yeah, about that: http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/02/web-forum-for-iphone-developers-hosted-malware-that-hacked-facebook/ http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/02/web-forum-for-iphone... http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/02/pwned-in-7-seconds-hackers-use-flash-and-ie-to-target-forbes-visitors/ http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/02/pwned-in-7-seconds-h... etc etc
garrettr_ 11y ago
They're designed to trick you, so I don't think any population, no matter how sophisticated, should trust themselves to correctly identify malicious websites 100% of the time. Additionally, some sites may potentially contain exploits that run as soon as you visit the site (vulnerabilities in plugins like Java or Flash, drive-by downloads, etc.) in which case it doesn't matter if you correctly identify the website as malicious and hit the "Back" button - it's already too late. Much better to avoid loading the content at all, which is exactly what is achieved with SafeBrowsing.

ygjb 11y ago

Safebrowsing protects you from more than tricky websites - it blocks sites and services that are known to serve malware. It doesn't matter how clever a user you are, if your browser (doesn't matter which one) navigates to a site that hosts malicious code that targets an unpatched vulnerability, you're hosed.

RubyPinch 11y ago

sure, you might not click on an advert or the such, but XSS isn't exactly visible, along with a whole host of other problems

magicalist 11y ago

> But I would hope the majority of HN users are pretty good at spotting, and steering clear of malicious websites yeah, about that: http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/02/web-forum-for-iphone-developers-hosted-malware-that-hacked-facebook/ http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/02/web-forum-for-iphone... http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/02/pwned-in-7-seconds-hackers-use-flash-and-ie-to-target-forbes-visitors/ http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/02/pwned-in-7-seconds-h... etc etc

garrettr_ 11y ago

They're designed to trick you, so I don't think any population, no matter how sophisticated, should trust themselves to correctly identify malicious websites 100% of the time. Additionally, some sites may potentially contain exploits that run as soon as you visit the site (vulnerabilities in plugins like Java or Flash, drive-by downloads, etc.) in which case it doesn't matter if you correctly identify the website as malicious and hit the "Back" button - it's already too late. Much better to avoid loading the content at all, which is exactly what is achieved with SafeBrowsing.