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Is metacafe safe?

Posted: Tue Aug 28, 2007 10:53 am
by seodevhead
Does anyone here think watching videos at metacafe.com is a potential virus/spyware risk? It took me a long while to realize that YouTube is generally safe... but having gotten a virus through a video (buffer overrun) on a video website probably 6 years ago.. since then I have been very hesitant to watch videos on these video sites.

Anyone here watch videos on metacafe?

Posted: Tue Aug 28, 2007 11:14 am
by The Phoenix
Anything you access online can be a risk. Thats why you:

- Run an antivirus with regular updates
- Regularly run spyware cleanup utilities
- Run as a non-priveledged user
- Keep your firewall up to date
- Keep a recent ghost/dd/clone image of your system so you can instantly restore if you need to

All of those help reduce your risks. You can also run a non-Windows OS. Mac OS is extremely under targetted for viruses, and most Linux/BSD distro's are so well built that you are extremely unlikely to get a virus that way.

I do visit Metacafe, and Youtube. There is a risk, but its less substantial since it has to break through the protections in Flash and your browser.

All in all, definitely not a "top-ten" risk by any means.

Posted: Tue Aug 28, 2007 11:42 am
by TheMoose
As far as I'm aware, there is no buffer issue with Flash player, which both Youtube and Metacafe use to stream their videos. And if anything, you'd think it would break the buffer on the server and not your browser since the video is being decoded on the server.

Sites that stream movies without a wrapper (no flash wrapper) definitely run a higher risk of viruses than do video sites, but I think a lot of those issues have been taken care of recently with the whole buffer issue.

Posted: Tue Aug 28, 2007 2:08 pm
by seodevhead
Yea... being that it's flash... I figure there isn't much room for an exploit through the video.

So I guess metacafe is about on par with YouTube as far as virus-risk.

Posted: Tue Aug 28, 2007 4:23 pm
by superdezign
seodevhead wrote:So I guess metacafe is about on par with YouTube as far as virus-risk.
I don't know of any *.flv exploits. If they do find some, then both websites are in trouble (though Adobe/Macromedia does a good job with keeping up security-wise).