LinkScanner Identifies Itself As IE6

AVG's LinkScanner feature continues to be controversial. And The Register continues to field complaints about LinkScanner's affect on website statistics. LinkScanner donwloads websites found in search results looking for sites that try to download malware onto your computer. LinkScanner now identifies itself as Internet Explorer 6 to websites after webmasters began filtering it from their traffic logs. This makes it undistinguishable from normal web traffic and skews website traffic statistics which hurts website advertising revenue. The Register quotes Steve Jackson, co-chair of the International Web Analytics Association:

"In order to make an omelet you have to crack some eggs. But a good omelet has cheese, ham, peppers, mushrooms and all sorts of other ingredients which AVG seem to have forgotten about."

While the controversy over the LinkScanner's bandwidth hogging and traffic skewing is a serious problem, the problem of websites that install malware on your computer is very real. Tools like LinkScanner would seem to be necessary to protect less sophisticated users of vulnerable operating systems (like Windows, there I've said it) from having their computers attacked by websites which knowingly or not are hosting malware which exploits unprotected computers.