There have been a lot of postings for movie/music/PSP download sites here and other places around the web of late. While the affiliates who market the links will claim that they are members of the sites they market and that everything is perfectly "legit"--their fine-print disclaimers tell a different story:

Their pious disclaimers, coupled with their phishing for personal information before they even let you be redirected off of one site onto the illegal download site, do not pass the sniff test.

But, why take my word for it? McAfee, the Internet company long associated with anti-virus protection for your computer, has an award-winning, in-house program called Site Advisor. What Site Advisor does is survey the Internet and check websites for certain criteria, including phishing, adware, malware, and virus threats (including trojan horses), and enters the information into a publicly-accessible database. In addition to their own research, they solicit input from the public-at-large to submit URL's and offer feedback on questionable websites.

I use this database to check on some of the questionable download sites, myself.

Even better than going to the McAfee Site Advisor is having the McAfee Site Advisor come to you. They now have a downloadable browser plug-in that puts a color-coded tab at the lower left of your window; green is safe, yellow is a caution, and red is a known bad site.

The main features of the download are:

• Safe Search Ratings
• Safe Browse Ratings
• Exploit Protection
• Advanced Phishing Protection
• Automatic Updates

The download is FREE and only takes seconds to download. Isn't knowing that you are not going to be scammed by Internet predators worth your piece of mind?

Click here to go to the download page right now and save yourself from present and future threats:

For those with Mozilla Firefox:
http://www.siteadvisor.com/download/ff.html

For those with Internet Explorer:
http://www.siteadvisor.com/download/ie.html

For those of you not using either Firefox or IE, there isn't a version yet available, but I will add it to this article as soon as it does become available.

I just installed this tool about an hour ago and checked out the sites that I've posted about in the comments section of some other articles. Sure enough, red light for them.

There are enough risks in life not to leave ourselves open to unscrupulous individuals who wish to profit from your lack of knowledge. For the record, I am not an affiliate or paid representative of McAfee, so I don't stand to gain anything by having you download these files; I am just looking out for my fellow net citizens.