Google's "reported attack site" nonsense could lead to a Firefox boycott

This seems hard to believe. Does anyone else have this issue while browsing with FF3. I use opera so I can't test it.

It happened to me once.

I think that they majority of these sites have the "I Frame" spyware problem. At least the ones that are legitimate sites and get blocked. I had a client who was added to the list and he had a normal website but his server was compromised and "I Frames" were added that distributed spyware.

This can happen on Windows and Linux servers and be appended to otherwise legitimate sites.

See this example:

http://www.security-forums.com/viewtopic.php?t=53109

This is happening all the time.

I have turned that "feature" off in Firefox. I'm perfectly able to determine for myself which sites are problematic and which are not. An of course, running on Linux means most attack sites don't do anything at all :-)

To turn it off in Firefox on Linux:

Edit/Preferences, then in the Preferences dialog click on Security in the top row, then un-check "Block reported attack sites" immediately underneath.

Turning this off also speeds up the page load.

I turned this off ages ago, as it causes I/O issues on one of my laptop's hard drives.

The article has numerous errors. First, the mozilla forum thread linked is mostly from 2008. Second the old myth "Linux users could care less for this "feature" since most malicious software doesn't affect them" is BS, since this is mainly targeted at protection against phishing, which is platform independent.

I can understand that webmasters can be angry, but really, it's your responsibility to make sure users are safe. Sure, the system isn't prefect, and may punish webmasters too much, but they shouldn't be so sloppy as to leave malicious links on their pages.

The first problem has already been corrected (and is no longer flagged by Firefox), and the second example has apparently been shut down by AOL.

It seem Firefox and Google are doing their job.