Comment by esprehn
3 years ago
> I don't actually believe that it has blocked that many people from being phished
The data says the opposite, the safe browsing list is very effective* which is why many other browsers and systems use the same list to block malicious pages.
Google publishes data about the frequency of warnings displayed too: https://transparencyreport.google.com/safe-browsing/overview
* Of course it could be better.
Very effective at... what? I mean, they seem to not be able to tell the difference between a legit mastodon instance and a phishing site, so why would they suddenly be able to tell if it effectively blocked a site that was actually malicious?
Yes, blocking sites on a blocklist works very well. Whether those sites are legit or not doesnt matter at that point, to them, as they assume they all are malicious.
Do you see what I mean?
> ... so why would they suddenly be able to tell if it effectively blocked a site that was actually malicious?
The fact that there was one false positive does not imply there are no true positives.
Google crawls malware on sites all the time: https://security.googleblog.com/2009/10/show-me-malware.html...