On Tue, January 13, 2009 7:07 pm, Kevin Callahan wrote:

> so is the IP being blocked or her domain name blacklisted?

There are some detailed explanations of how this works, as it was
previously described when the feature was first implemented as a Firefox
plugin.

To answer an earlier question in the thread, Safari does *not* report to
Google for every URL you hit - the system involves a locally cached
database of hashes for restricted URLs (at the domain level, I believe,
not IP or page level). As far as I recall, the hashes are in fact broken
in two parts (perhaps just split in half?)... if the URL you navigate to
matches the first half of a hash, then it is a possible match, and then (I
believe) Google is queried to compare the rest of the hash - so the vast
majority of the time Google has no idea whether you've hit a given URL,
only when there's a possible match, which should be quite rare - I know
I've yet to see this feature activate.

I'm sure my recollection is at best only partially accurate, but I do know
this mechanism does not hit Google for every page, domain, or IP you
surf... most of the checking is done against a local database, which is
periodically updated. Search Google for more information - I know there
were several blogs which posted detailed descriptions of this feature when
it was launched, since Apple provided little information about it.

-R

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