FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

Chrome Update Will Protect You When Streaming Sports from Shady Sites

“Click here to upgrade Flash” is a lie.
Image: Google

It's almost as if Google designed its latest Chrome security feature for people who spend their weekends trolling Reddit for links to illegal live sports streams.

Google's popular web browser will now warn users when they're about to visit a website that's known to show phony, malware-laden "download buttons" to visitors. These buttons are designed to look like legitimate links to upgrade common software like Adobe Flash:

Clicking on these buttons typically downloads malware in the form executable file directly to the user's download directory. Don't do that unless you want to spend the better part of your weekend repairing the damage done to your computer.

The Chrome update isn't a total banhammer: I just visited several well-known streaming sites and Chrome allowed me to proceed without issue. Rather, this update is designed to weed out the bad actors of an admittedly shady activity.

Speaking from extensive experience, phony download buttons like these tend to litter shady websites that offer links to free live sports streams, making this latest Chrome update vital for thirsty sports fans. To be clear, users can choose to override Chrome's warning by clicking the "show details" link, then clicking the "visit this unsafe site" link.

That's pretty foolproof, but another option would be to use Firefox and install NoScript, an extension that lets users selectively launch Javascript and plugins like Flash and Java on a site-by-site basis. That means a user could visit, say, awesomefreesports123.com, then configure Firefox to only launch the stream of the actual game, with all those phony buttons and pop-ups prevented from opening altogether.