MIT Graduates Enhance Web Safety With Innovative Service

A group of graduates from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) aim to change that by crawling the web with hundreds, and soon thousands, of virtual computers that detect which websites attempt to download software to a visitor's computer and whether giving out an e-mail address during registration can lead to an avalanche of spam.

The goal is to create a service that lets the average internet user know what a website actually does with any information collected or what a download will do to a computer, Tom Pinckney, vice president of engineering and co-founder of the start-up SiteAdvisor, said during a presentation at the CodeCon conference here.

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