Chaos Magnet

Netscape, anti-phishing, and competition with Firefox

I don't know why it surprises me to see that Netscape is competing with Firefox rather than working with it. Or maybe I should rephrase that, because I suppose it's not quite accurate. I mean, yes, Firefox comes from Mozilla, which sprang into existance when Netscape set it free. I'm not really clear how much of Firefox consists of that original code, true. But of course Netscape will be incorporating Firefox into their browsers, so they do get the benefit and ... I've gone and made myself dizzy.

Never mind. The important thing here is that Netscape is adding antiphishing capabilities to the browser in the form of blacklists of "Web sites that are suspected of purveying spyware, phishing schemes and other hostile code. When someone accesses such a site using Netscape 8, the browser would flash warnings to the user and disable various technologies with security implications, including ActiveX, scripting and cookies. Sites thought to be harmless would join a white list and gain a green-light icon in the address bar. Unknown sites would be coded yellow."

Technorati tags:

src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~s/ChaosMagnet?i=http://www.chaosmagnet.com/blog/archives/000561.html" type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8">