Horny fox is bad for traffic


An alert sent out by the Danish Forest and Nature Agency warns danish drivers that the next couple of months will have more fox crossing roads than usual. Many of the foxes that loose their lives are young and inexperienced and haven’t learned all the dangers and threats that we humans are. Sadly the alert is only in danish: Advarsel til bilisterne: Øget risiko for påkørsel af ræve

So to answer your question – why am I writing about foxes running wild? Well, mostly because I immediately came to think of my own little firefox reading this. I too run across some roads on the internet – and the bad things that can happen to you out there are not as obvious as a 14-wheeler truck. Phishing, spoofing, illegit cookies and on and on are daily threats on the internet. So, what ways are there to protect Firefox from all the bad traffic out there?
I’ve been looking at this extension for firefox:

Google Safe Browsing is an extension to Firefox that alerts you if a web page that you visit appears to be asking for your personal or financial information under false pretences. This type of attack, known as phishing or spoofing, is becoming more sophisticated, widespread and dangerous.

Google Safe Browsing for Firefox

…any more suggestions for enhancing privacy and safe browsing?

[Image from Wild Nature Images]

Update:
Version 3 of Firefox will (among others) have these security features:

  • One-click site information. Want to know more about the site you’re visiting? Click the site’s icon in the location bar to see who owns it. Identify information is prominently displayed and easier than ever to understand.
  • Malware protection. Firefox 3 warns you if you arrive at a web site that is known to install viruses, spyware, trojans, or other dangerous software (known as malware). You can see what the warning looks like by clicking here.
  • Web forgery protection enhanced. Now when you visit a page that’s suspected of being a forgery, you’re shown a special page instead of the contents of the page with a warning. Click here to see what it looks like.
  • Easier to understand SSL errors. The errors presented when an invalid SSL certificate is encountered have been clarified to make it easier to understand what the problem is.
  • Out-of-date add-on protection. Firefox 3 now automatically checks add-on and plugin versions and disables older, insecure versions.
  • Secure add-on updates. Add-on update security has been improved by disallowing add-ons that use an insecure update mechanism.
  • Anti-virus integration. Firefox 3 now informs anti-virus software when executable files are downloaded.
  • Windows Vista parental controls support. Firefox 3 supports the Vista system-wide parental control setting for disabling file downloads.

Read more here: Firefox 3 for developers

2 thoughts on “Horny fox is bad for traffic

  1. For various reasons I normally use IE which already has protection agains phising etc. However besides having protection in the browser it is a good thing to protect yourself using firewall/antivirus packages. Most of the major brands provide phising protection along with all of the other common filters. Better to be safe than sorry :)

  2. Ohh – strangely engough it didn’t even cross my mind to use IE…

    Also I just realized that the extension I’ve linked to above here, has been included in the google toolbar for firefox – and I have some considerations using that toolbar…

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>