I’m curious if any of the uninstalls might be related to firefox 3’s stability (or, um, lack thereof). On some of my PCs it seems just fine. but on my main computer, which is running vista, it crashes left and right and so I’ve had to uninstall most of my plugins to try to get it under control and am now sorely missing interclue. :-( Are you guys hearing about instability problems with firefox 3?

Very glad that you’re looking to explore Interclue in a bit of depth. Be happy to answer any questions you might have.

Badly designed add-ons can certainly expand the “attack surface” of a web browser, but we’ve put a fair bit of thought into how Interclue could be attacked, eg to mount a cross site scripting attack on another site, and we’re confident that it is secure. Previewed page content is stripped of any scripts before being rendered, and I would say it’s near certain that looking at an Interclue preview of a page is safer than actually loading it in a new tab, which with Firefox, is generally pretty safe.

Firefox addons downloaded from addons.mozilla.org are examined by mozilla editors before they are released from the “Sandbox area” of the site to where the general public can download them.

Also, Mozilla maintains a blocklist that Firefox wiil$ check every session to see if there is a plugin or addon installed that should be disabled to prevent browser crashes or security issues.

The big difference between Interclue and AVG’s Toolbar or McAfee SiteAdvisor is that Interclue is a productivity focused addon whereas those products are purely security addons. Interclue makes it faster to identify bad links, but as of now, does not maintain it’s own blocklist of malware and phishing sites - it instead uses the blocklist that is already built into Firefox, which is updated hourly from a feed provided by Google and StopBadWare.

Firefox itself will already prevent those pages from loading should you actually navigate to them, Interclue takes the additional step of warning you before you click by placing a warning icon next to the dodgy link. This “Danger” Linkclue is only one of about 50 different types of icon that Interclue uses to label links before the user clicks them.

Interclue also provides superb content previews, which are completely lacking from the security tools in question.

There’s no reason not to run Interclue alongside other security related add-ons, but one should be aware that much of the time this will result in significant duplication of effort and more “false positives”.

I’ve been meaning to write up some more documentation about this, thanks for reminding me.

Regards,
Seth.

I can easily see how these extra applications can be a hacker’s best friend. Especially with Windows, one must exercise care. Not everyone is on Red Hat or Ubuntu, which is more immune.

Has this product tested well for hackability? What about other variants?

Before I download or recommend, I want to know the pluses and minuses, potentially of this program. I also want to know how this is so different than AVG’s weblink scanner.

It’s rather exciting to see another era of internet security, but we still need to know the ins and outs of it. Maybe I’m reading too much Pc World or Computer World, to just download and run things.

By the way, other than being in the media, I am a computer junkie too. I’m sure you know that by reading this comment too.

Thanks for your effort to help us, thus far. We appreciate that. Although, it’s not going the whole distance.

Mikel Grenier
Toledo, Ohio

Congrats to you and the Interclue team! It’s great to see Interclue is getting more and more popular. Keep up the great work!

Marek