RSS Feeds: Haute Secure Is A Blogger's Public Enemy Number One!
You may not know this yet, but Haute Secure is the blog community's public enemy number one right now. The service is still in beta but I can foresee it having damaging effects on the reputations of popular blogs.
If a visitor is browsing with Internet Explorer and has the Haute Secure application installed, the visitor will receive warnings in the upper left of the browser's toolbar under certain conditions:
- You use FeedBurner for your feeds. An orange warning will be received.
- You display Google Ads. An orange warning will be received.
- You display Alexa statistics. A red warning will be received.
If an orange warning is received, the content will still be received. If a red warning is received, the content is blocked. I wonder how many other services, that bloggers use, are generating orange or red warnings.
One of my readers pointed out that his browser was flagging my Alexa badge as malware — he received a red warning. I don't know how many people are using the Haute Secure application, or how many will end up using it, but I don't want visitors avoiding my blog just because of orange and red warnings. I removed the Alexa badge.
I don't get thousands of visitors a day, so any negative effect on my blog would be negligible. What about blogs that do get thousands of visitors a day? I may be wrong, but I think it could have a serious impact on their traffic.
I don't know what we, as bloggers, can do about it. Does anyone have any suggestions?
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If they are flagging AdSense I would be interested in seeing if they have any ties to Microsoft.
As "so-called" former Microsoft employees, I'm willing to bet they do.
I'm not sure about Microsoft, but I got a lot of page views from Mountain View, CA after this post. Google happens to be there. Coincidence?
As I said earlier, I think that their "heart" is in the right place but the implementation is not so good. I've not seen products that use white/blacklists ever work well for things that you want to receive, as opposed to things that you don't. I'm sure that Google is interested in this as well, though, as they're interested in anything to do with Microsoft and the Web (their turf, after all) as well as perhaps any ideas about how to filter the Phishers.
And, I'm so glad that I can get to your page from work. Perhaps moving the widgets to the bottom has allowed the page to load through our own filters or whatever.
Nah, they probably had Alexa filtered. :mrgreen: