Online Tunes Are More Risky Than Web Porn - When It Comes to Malware

About 9% of adult sites produce spyware, adware or spam, compared with 19% of digital music sites found in a study by McAfee.

By Joseph Menn / Times Staff Writer

Whatever threat online pornography might pose to society's morals, online music might pose a bigger threat to society's computers. A study scheduled to be released today found that about 9% of adult sites that turned up high in search-engine rankings had such PC-damaging problems or annoyances as spyware, adware and spam associated with them. Yet searching for digital music was twice as risky — more than 19% of the sites produced by such queries were risky for computer users, according to the study by McAfee Inc., a Santa Clara, California-based company that makes computer-security software.

Other risky searches included those for electronic gadgets and for background "wallpaper" to decorate computer screens. Researchers have one idea why looking for porn appears to be safer: The business side of that industry works even without the extra hustling. Since it's harder to make a living selling digital music, those hawking such items are far more likely to attach programs that spew unwanted ads or worse. "The tier-one adult sites are doing phenomenally well as businesses, and because of that they very much have their house in order," said McAfee Senior Product Manager Mark Maxwell.

The digital music searches studied include those for such file-sharing programs as BearShare, which often include intrusive advertising programs. BearShare took the honors as the single riskiest search term, returning unsafe sites at a 46% rate. Other findings from McAfee's database were not included in the study, including the news that Britney Spears is slightly more dangerous to search for than Lindsay Lohan. The former couple of Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston, meanwhile, are a 36% more hazardous combination than the current pair of Pitt and Angelina Jolie.

The study is the third of its kind from McAfee, which owns a popular free service called SiteAdvisor. It rates millions of websites as red for risky, yellow for somewhat risky and green for safe, warning Web surfers before they click through. The latest paper also found that sponsored search results, which are paid for by advertisers, are twice as likely to be risky as regular search results. It also compared the five most popular search engines, finding that Yahoo Inc. had the safest unpaid results and the riskiest paid results.

For thousands of popular searches, the top 500 unpaid listings were about as safe at one search engine as they were at another. Yahoo came out best with 2.7% that were red or yellow, and IAC/InterActiveCorp's Ask.com was the worst at 3.3%. The range was larger when it came to advertised results: from a low of 4.1% problematic results at Ask to 9% at Yahoo. Google Inc. has toughened its checks on advertisers and made its paid results safer in the last year, McAfee said, while Yahoo has gotten worse.

Yahoo declined an interview request. In a statement Saturday, Vice President of Marketplace Quality Reggie Davis wrote that the unpaid search results "represent the vast majority of clicked links." "We will continue to improve our performance in this area by investing in technology," Davis said. An Ask.com spokeswoman pointed to the company's sharp improvement in paid results, which boosted its overall safety performance from worst to the middle of the pack.

Many of the advertised sites that McAfee flagged are obvious scams pointed out by SiteAdvisor users, including those that make impossible claims about obtaining green cards for immigrants and repairing damaged credit. "We are struck by search engines' failure to block even the most notorious and widespread of scam ads — a decision we suspect arises out of search engines' business objectives," the study's authors wrote.

In better news, the number of the very worst sites — those that use known vulnerabilities in software to automatically install keystroke loggers and other malicious programs — remained quite small. McAfee turned up less than one in a thousand among the top search engine results. Google has begun to warn users before they go to one of those sites, and a spokeswoman said that the effort would remain the priority over fighting such lesser threats as adware and spam. "Google concentrates on Web pages that pose real danger to our users, and we are confident that we are protecting searchers from these threats," company spokeswoman Katie Watson said.

HPV - 'Tell Someone'? We Tried!

Yes, HPV causes cervical cancer. Why did people scoff eight years ago, when we wanted to warn them?

By Gina R. Dalfonzo

You've probably seen the commercials. Over the last few months, it's been almost impossible not to see them. They parade endlessly across our screens—a multitude of women of all ages, from all backgrounds—and they all have the same urgent message to share: "Tell someone that human papillomavirus causes cervical cancer. Tell someone. Tell someone. Tell someone."
To which I can only respond, "We tried." Lest you think me odd for talking to the television, let me add that I usually only do it in moments of extreme frustration. And the "Tell Someone" ads frustrate me because, for years now, friends and colleagues of mine have been trying to "tell someone," anyone, about the HPV-cervical cancer link. But no one wanted to listen.
Someone told me about HPV a few years ago when I was working at Family Research Council (FRC), a Christian public policy group in Washington, D.C. Friends and co-workers of mine there were lobbying for the addition of a warning about HPV to condom packages. Specifically, they wanted to warn people about the HPV-cancer link and the fact that condoms could not protect women against this dangerous virus.
All the way back at the turn of this century, FRC staffers Heather Farish (now Heather Cirmo) and Yvette Cantu (now Yvette Schneider) wrote in a thoroughly researched policy paper:

"HPV has been linked to over 90 percent of all invasive cervical cancers, and is the number two cause of cancer deaths among women, after breast cancer. Approximately 16,000 new cases of cervical cancer are diagnosed each year, and 5,000 women die annually from this disease."

To back up their statistics, they cited such prestigious sources as The New England Journal of Medicine and the Kaiser Family Foundation. In short, just as the commercials tell us to do, they told someone. And they were told to shut up.
A chorus of voices from the media, politicians, and organizations like and the Planned Parenthood and the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the U.S. (SIECUS) derailed the condom-labeling effort, claiming that FRC and its allies were putting teenagers and young adults in danger by making condoms look bad. "What no one in the HPV brigade mentions," scoffed Sharon Lerner in the Village Voice in 1999, "is that, even by conservative estimates, a teeny number of people who have the virus—far less than 1 percent—will develop cervical cancer." The implication was that it was hardly worth putting warnings on condoms for that minuscule number of women.
How strange, then, that just eight years later—with the same amount of information about the link between HPV and cancer, and fewer infections and deaths than we had then—the calls to vaccinate that "teeny number" of women and girls are loud and urgent. Suddenly, the situation is dire enough that governors and legislatures in more than 20 states have either ordered mandatory HPV vaccinations, or are attempting to do so.
Of course, these recent efforts hit a snag when it came out that at least some of the lawmakers had accepted donations from Merck, the drug company that manufactures the vaccinations and came up with the ubiquitous "Tell Someone" campaign. But the call for mandatory vaccinations is still ongoing—and, believe it or not, coming from the same people who used to say that HPV was no big deal and that we really needed to lower our voices. Having turned 180 degrees in how they view the urgency of the disease, these former critics could have joined with people who had already been spreading the message for years. Instead, they attacked them.
In an article in The Nation titled "Virginity or Death!" (I'm not kidding), written when the vaccine first came out, Katha Pollitt accused Christian conservatives of wanting high HPV infection rates to undermine the case for condoms and to "try to scare kids away from sex." "With HPV potentially eliminated, the antisex brigade will lose a card it has regarded as a trump unless it can persuade parents that vaccinating their daughters will turn them into tramps, and that sex today is worse than cancer tomorrow," she wrote. "What is it with these right-wing Christians? Faced with a choice between sex and death, they choose death every time. … As they flex their political muscle, right-wing Christians increasingly reveal their condescending view of women as moral children who need to be kept in line sexually by fear." Pollitt's rage was triggered by a quotation from Bridget Maher, who was then working for FRC (she's now at the Department of Health and Human Services). Maher had told the New Scientist, "Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful because they may see it as a license to engage in premarital sex." As Maher would later tell me, "FRC was never against the vaccine and never said they would oppose FDA approval." This is consistent with the statement on FRC's website about the vaccine. "We merely expressed some concerns about it."
Feminists could be expected to have similar concerns over lawmakers taking money from drug companies to force a brand-new vaccine on young girls. But many are apparently too busy being angry at the people who had expressed any concerns: Christians. At this point, it's tempting just to retreat with a pout and a grumpy "They hate us no matter WHAT we say, so why bother?" We'd certainly have a point. But we can't just leave it there. Instead, we need to learn something from the bitter ironies on display here: namely, that our society will gravitate toward any message that endorses sexuality unencumbered by biblical morality. If "telling someone," as the ad campaign urges, means that they'll be advocating safe sex, all well and good. But if the cause of free sex is better served by keeping silent, the message becomes, "Tell no one." Not even if it might put her health at risk. The urge for absolute sexual autonomy and freedom from any kind of control is that powerful—and that deadly.
That's precisely why we cannot retreat when the physical and spiritual health of those around us is at stake. Our goal should always be to "tell someone" where destructive behavior can lead—whether telling someone happens to be fashionable at the moment or not.

UPDATE 4/25/07: I just ran across an informative article on HPV. It can be accessed on WebMD. The article is well worth the read.