Re: The Spirit of Free Software, or The Reality

[Wouter Verhelst <wouter@debian.org>]

On Wed, Jul 15, 2015 at 02:34:41PM +0900, Mike Hommey wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 15, 2015 at 01:09:47PM +0800, Paul Wise wrote:
> > On Wed, Jul 15, 2015 at 12:26 PM, Mike Hommey wrote:
> > 
> > > FUD is easy. How about documenting yourself on how Safe browsing
> > > actually works? Hint: urls are _never_ sent to Google. The worst thing
> > > that Google can know is that the _hash_ of /some/ url you went to, has the
> > > first n bits matching the first n bits of the hash of one (or multiple)
> > > of the known malware of phishing urls. Nothing more.
> > 
> > Why doesn't it just download the full list and do checks client-side?
> 
> The full list is huge, so it downloads a smaller list with hash
> prefixes, then when it hits a match, it downloads a list of all the
> hashes that start with that prefix.

In other words, that's what it actually does, modulo some optimization
so it doesn't have to download terabytes of data.

-- 
It is easy to love a country that is famous for chocolate and beer

  -- Barack Obama, speaking in Brussels, Belgium, 2014-03-26