Safe Surfing: McAfee acquires MIT startup SiteAdvisor

SiteAdvisor, developed my MIT students, is a huge database of websites that either have executables with spyware/adware or start spamming you with e-mail once you give them yours.

McAfee today announced that it had acquired SiteAdvisor to improve its online security offerings. Just like the US Homeland Security National Threat level color codes, SiteAdvisor browser plug-in places a "safe," "caution" or "warning" label whenever a user visits a Web site.

When a user searches through Google, Yahoo or MSN, SiteAdvisor displays the safety rating next to the search result. Additionally, as users browse the internet, a button on the toolbar would change color based on that site's security rating.

SiteAdvisor also hosts a Site Report page that documents the results of every test on every Web site. Here's a sample SiteAdvisor report on Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.

SiteAdvisor | McAfee Press Release | BetaNews

How to Download Contacts from Facebook To Outlook Address Book

Facebook users are not too pleased with the "walled garden" approach of Facebook. The reason is simple - while you can easily import your Outlook address book and GMail contacts into Facebook, the reverse path is closed. There's no "official" way to export your Facebook friends email addresses or contact phone numbers out as a CSV file so that you can sync the contacts data with Outlook, GMail or your BlackBerry. Some third-party Facebook hacks like "Facebook Sync" (for Mac) and "Facebook Downloader" (for Windows) did allow you to download your Facebook friends' names, emails, mobile phone number and profile photo to the desktop but they were quickly removed for violation of Facebook Terms of Use. How to Download Contacts from Facebook There are still some options to take Friends data outside the walls of Facebook wall. Facebook offers the Takeout option allowing you to download all Facebook data locally to the disk (include

Digital Inspiration

Digital Inspiration is a popular tech blog by Amit Agarwal . Our popular Google Scripts include Gmail Mail Merge (send personalized emails with Gmail ), Document Studio (generate PDFs from Google Forms ) and File Upload Forms ( receive files in Google Drive). Also see Reverse Image Mobile Search , Online Speech Recognition and Website Screenshots , the most useful websites on the Internet.

PhishTank Detects Phishing Websites by Digg Style Voting

OpenDNS, a free service that helps anyone surf the Internet faster with a simple DNS tweak , will announce PhishTank today. PhishTank is a free public database of phishing URLs where anyone can submit their phishes via email or through the website. The submissions are verified by the other community members who then vote for the suspected site. This is such a neat idea as sites can be categorized just based on user feedback without even having to manually verify each and every submission. PhishTank employs the "feedback loop" mechanism where users will be kept updated with the status' of the phish they submit either via email alerts or a personal RSS feed . Naturally, once the PhishTank databases grows, other sites can harness the data using open APIs which will remain free. OpenDNS would also use this data to improve their existing phishing detection algorithms which are already very impressive and efficient. PhishTank | PhishTank Blog [Thanks Allison] Related: Google

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