Netcraft security toolbar for Firefox and IE

 
The toolbar runs on any operating system supported by Firefox and
displays the hosting location, country, longevity, popularity, and
an abstracted risk rating for each site visited.
 
Additionally, the toolbar blocks access to phishing sites reported
by other members of the Netcraft Toolbar community and validated
by Netcraft, mobilizing the community into a giant neighborhood
watch scheme which empowers the most alert and experienced members
to protect the vulnerable against fraud and phishing attacks. Well
over 7,000 phishing sites have been detected and blocked by people
using the Netcraft Toolbar since the system started at the turn of
the year.
 
It is available to download from the Toolbar website, and requires
no special administrator privileges to install.

Customized versions with corporate branding and navigation are also
available.
 

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Wed May 25 11:09:25 2005: Subject:   TonyLawrence


I just installed it. There's a little bit of red showing in the risk rating for this site, so be careful :-)





Wed May 25 14:41:29 2005: Subject:   BigDumbDinosaur


There's a little bit of red showing in the risk rating for this site, so be careful :-)

That red is showing up because they know what a devil you are. <Grin>



Wed May 25 19:29:20 2005: Subject:   TonyLawrence


Probably true, but really it's because Interland has had more than its share of misbehaving sites..



Wed May 25 20:32:59 2005: Subject:   TonyLawrence


It's also interesting how they rank sites. I wonder how they know (or think they know) how much traffic a site is getting.. if you compare their rating to Alexa, it usually seems to be lower - for example Alexa has this site at around 70,000 right now and Netcraft says 44,373. I checked around a few places and their numbers make sense, but I wonder where they get them from?



Mon May 30 16:39:04 2005: Subject:   TonyLawrence


I see that they get them from Netcraft Tool Bar use :-)

Interesting: Alexa gets its ranking from their toolbar, which is heavily slanted toward Windows because it only works in IE. Netcraft works on Firefox or IE, which at least takes the OS snobbery out of it.

But I think both of these tend to skew toward specific populations: Alexa probably has a higher proportion of web site owners among its users because of interest in popularity stats. That would probably tend to make Alexa stats give more weight to sites dealing with web site creation issues. Netcraft users are likely more skewed toward people concerned about security, and thus security related sites might get higher Netcraft ratings.

The people who *really* know popularity are the search engines, because they know what people click on in their searches. Google knows the most (an incredibly high percentage of traffic that lands here comes from Google searches), but of course that's biased toward people who prefer Google.. and Google doesn't tell us much about what they know anyway.

Nobody has the complete picture - well, maybe some core internet routers know, but I don't think anyone is getting stats from those.



Sat Jul 9 19:31:41 2005: Subject: A lot of you must have installed this   TonyLawrence


A lot of the regulars here must have installed this, because we've gone from 44000+ rating to under 23000 in a very short time, while Alexa ratings have barely budged in the same time period..

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