Some products are more marketing than muscle. The most recent example of this is Haute Security, which is slated to be bundled with Opera 9.5 allegedly to "protect consumers from next-generation Web-based threats".

Peek under the hood of Haute Security and amidst the bold claims you find nothing more than blacklisting supplemented with community-based reporting. Hardly something that can be described as "reinventing Web-based threat detection" - yet that's exactly how its being branded in press releases.

And what exactly IS a next-generation threat? The term 'next' implies that which is yet to come. But blacklisting is only effective against that which has already been. The real question becomes, do you want to defend against yesterday's threat which has likely already come and gone?

It doesn't matter what a site did a week ago, a day ago, or even five minutes ago. All that matters is what the site is doing at the moment the user attempts to access it. And for that you'll need real-time, on-access scanning. Which is what ScanSafe does. Which happens to be an example of more muscle than marketing.