This year, Google’s Safe Browsing tools celebrate their tenth anniversary, according to a blog post published earlier today. Since 2007, some iteration of the technology has been shielding users from potentially harmful sites — and as of 2017, the company claims that some 3 billion devices benefit from its protection.
In its simplest form, Safe Browsing is the warning you get when you try to access a potentially dangerous site. It might be offered up when your destination is suspected of carrying out phishing attacks, or distributing malware to visitors.
As well as the more visible components of Safe Browsing, there’s plenty more going on behind the scenes, so users are receiving the benefits of its protection even if they don’t see a red warning label. Many different systems are working in sync constantly in an attempt to identify all the different threats that are present on the web.
This expansive list of dangerous domains is used by many services offered by Google; it makes sure search results don’t lead users astray, it helps weed out any inappropriate ads, and it’s a part of the process that prevents malicious emails from hitting your Gmail inbox. But Google shares its Safe Browsing tools with others, too.
Apple and Mozilla both utilize Google’s research into the dark corners of the internet to protect people who surf with their Safari and Firefox browsers. A host of other web and app developers all benefit — for example, Snapchat uses it to vet links that are shared between users.
The scope of Safe Browsing has gotten bigger over the years, but its protection has improved in other ways, too. The rise of mobile devices has prompted Google to streamline the amount of data that actually needs to be beamed out, tailoring the information to the user’s needs, and making sure it’s as tightly compressed as possible.
Google has no plans to stop making improvements to Safe Browsing. Machine learning has long since helped the service scope out malicious content from the masses of sites and services that comprise the internet, and these techniques are growing more sophisticated all the time. The company sees artificial intelligence as having as much of an impact on how we browse the internet as the advent of the smartphone did, so it’s committed to making sure that Safe Browsing moves with the times.
A virtual private network (VPN) encrypts your internet traffic and routes it through a server run by the VPN provider. Websites see the VPN server’s IP address instead of yours, and you can get around geo-blocks, censorship, and ISP throttling. The best VPN services are paid, but there are still a handful of free options that do the job well.
Most free VPNs come with a hidden cost, because running servers isn’t cheap and a company that doesn’t charge you has to make its money somewhere else. Many do so by logging your browsing activity and selling it to advertisers, while others flood you with ads and track you across apps.
A stocked computer cache may be convenient for logging into and out of go-to sites in seconds flat, but a major buildup of these tracking codes could significantly impact your PC’s performance. If you’ve noticed that your PC has been running rather slow of late, or you’re using a new browser and don’t know how to clear its cache, we’ve got you covered with the following guide.
If you’re looking to clean up your Gmail inbox, but you don’t want to delete anything permanently, then choosing the archive option is your best bet. Whenever you archive an email, it is removed from your inbox folder while still remaining accessible. Here’s how to access any emails you have archived previously, as well as how to move such messages back to your regular inbox for fast access.