Wrapping Up Last Week: Google Safe Browsing, Open Source, BrowsAlyzer 3.0.6

Google’s Safe Browsing helps to identify and stop malicious URLs. But if it is just using the Lookup API part of it, it also transmits every tested URL, which could be regarded as legit, but potentially unwanted, tracking. There’s another mode that downloads some data and only verifies URLs that are very likely bad online.

While discussing it in Team Spybot recently, we decided to add Safe Browsing to BrowsAlyzer to be able to further test and classify URLs. We just uploaded the preview version 3.0.6 that includes this feature. Right now working on single URLs when selecting them, and using the Lookup API, but this is going to emerge into a full-scale search of all URLs BrowsAlyzer detects.

Inspired on a discussion on Reddit about Open Source, we also decided to release our code to access the Safe Browsing API as open source. We already have a few repositories open sources, but those are related to the development environment we use. So these three are our first repositories of code actually used in our products directly.