Google thinks the internet "may harm your computer"

ImprovoloneImprovolone Registered User regular
Nearly every Google search for me says “This site may harm your computer”. I googled the problem (lol?) and so many people are reporting this issue that most are figuring its a problem on the server end.
My advice: Chill, and just copy paste the URL from the Malware Warning page.

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Improvolone on

Posts

  • TrentusTrentus Registered User regular
    edited January 2009
    Seems to be all good now.

    Trentus on
  • DelzhandDelzhand Hard to miss. Registered User regular
    edited January 2009
    It's funny how I have so much faith in Google's power that any hiccup on their end causes me to question everything I've done in the past 24 hours.

    Delzhand on
  • GrimReaperGrimReaper Registered User regular
    edited January 2009
    I was going to post this myself, but I figured someone would. Yeah, noticed this myself earlier too. Seemed to be affecting the UK and US. Didn't check other country's though.

    Suddenly it had me doubting whether in fact the BBC website was a trustworthy site, the power of google man.

    GrimReaper on
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  • FyreWulffFyreWulff YouRegistered User, ClubPA regular
    edited January 2009
    Seems that the site that provides the badlist went down, so it failsafed to marking every site as bad.

    FyreWulff on
  • autono-wally, erotibot300autono-wally, erotibot300 love machine Registered User regular
    edited January 2009
    I mistyped a search as "BCD Cod" when I wanted "BCD Code", and google told me wikipedia could harm my computer
    Possible that they want to warn about sites which are wrongfully in the results

    autono-wally, erotibot300 on
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  • THEPAIN73THEPAIN73 Shiny. Real shiny.Registered User regular
    edited January 2009
    FyreWulff wrote: »
    Seems that the site that provides the badlist went down, so it failsafed to marking every site as bad.

    Good plan in all honesty.

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  • ButtcleftButtcleft Registered User regular
    edited January 2009
    and here I was thinking that skynet finally achieved sentience and was about to launch its war on organic kind.

    Buttcleft on
  • DharmaBumDharmaBum Registered User regular
    edited January 2009
    Just because I'm curious, does this have any affect on anything besides saying that "this site may harm your computer?"

    Like can you still access the sites in your Google search? Or is Google locking you out from the sites (read: the internet) that it deems as "dangerous?"

    DharmaBum on
  • ButtcleftButtcleft Registered User regular
    edited January 2009
    DharmaBum wrote: »
    Just because I'm curious, does this have any affect on anything besides saying that "this site may harm your computer?"

    Like can you still access the sites in your Google search? Or is Google locking you out from the sites (read: the internet) that it deems as "dangerous?"

    nope, just says it might be dangerous.

    Buttcleft on
  • HAKdragonHAKdragon Registered User regular
    edited January 2009
    Nearly every Google search for me says “This site may harm your computer”. I googled the problem (lol?) and so many people are reporting this issue that most are figuring its a problem on the server end.
    My advice: Chill, and just copy paste the URL from the Malware Warning page.


    Did you install AVG Free recently? By default, it has a search filter that, when you do a search (like ona google), can throw up warnings for pages that it doesn't know are "safe".

    Edit: Nevermind, this seems to be something different entirely.

    HAKdragon on
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  • strebaliciousstrebalicious Registered User regular
    edited January 2009
    Heh, me and the wife were trying to solve a question, so we googled 'Faye Dunaway' when this error came up. Here I just thought Google really didn't like Fate Dunaway.

    strebalicious on
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  • ImprovoloneImprovolone Registered User regular
    edited January 2009
    Buttcleft wrote: »
    DharmaBum wrote: »
    Just because I'm curious, does this have any affect on anything besides saying that "this site may harm your computer?"

    Like can you still access the sites in your Google search? Or is Google locking you out from the sites (read: the internet) that it deems as "dangerous?"

    nope, just says it might be dangerous.

    It wouldn't let me click anywhere to continue to the website. I had to copy paste the URL it found to get there.

    Improvolone on
    Voice actor for hire. My time is free if your project is!
  • TrentusTrentus Registered User regular
    edited January 2009
    THEPAIN73 wrote: »
    FyreWulff wrote: »
    Seems that the site that provides the badlist went down, so it failsafed to marking every site as bad.

    Good plan in all honesty.

    I'm not sure that I agree.

    I don't know the details about how often, or under which circumstances google checks the badlist to see if a site is on it or not, but it seems like it wouldn't be too much trouble or cause too much system over head to get it to set a bit each time it grabs a sites status from the list. Then, in the event that it can't connect to the database, it could look at this and throw up a warning saying "Hey, last time we checked, this site was on the naughty list. You've been warned." or, for each site that was marked as safe, it could just put a little "Was all good last we heard." message beside the search result.

    There's probably a great reason they don't do something like this already. But I still think it could've been handled better.

    Trentus on
  • FyreWulffFyreWulff YouRegistered User, ClubPA regular
    edited January 2009
    Caching like that would be easy to get around. Put up a good site, wait for the google bot to come by and check it, then throw up the bad site.

    Also, someone could just DDoS the badsite lister and make everyone go to bad sites during a peak time/coordinated attack.

    So failing safely towards all sites bad > letting sites bypass it through timed attacks.

    FyreWulff on
  • ImprovoloneImprovolone Registered User regular
    edited January 2009
    It's not like Google shutting down shuts the internet down either. But sometimes people don't think, prime example being my copy paste suggestion as opposed to using Yahoo!

    Improvolone on
    Voice actor for hire. My time is free if your project is!
  • TrentusTrentus Registered User regular
    edited January 2009
    FyreWulff wrote: »
    Caching like that would be easy to get around. Put up a good site, wait for the google bot to come by and check it, then throw up the bad site.

    Also, someone could just DDoS the badsite lister and make everyone go to bad sites during a peak time/coordinated attack.

    So failing safely towards all sites bad > letting sites bypass it through timed attacks.

    Well, ideally, it would only fall back to the cached data in the event it can't grab fresh info. Perhaps it could throw different warnings based on how recently the site was indexed. Would such sites be ranked high enough to pose a serious threat? Still, a simpler solution would be desirable.

    I'm still not convinced that lumping everything into the bad (or good) category is better than the alternative. There will be people who see that every result is marked bad, assume it's a problem with google (or the badlist guys), and just copy and paste the URL to the address bar anyway. I don't think there's a perfect solution (except for, you know, just don't use it), but I think it's better to be provided with more information so you can make a somewhat informed decision.

    Edit: So, according to the Google blog, the problem occurred not because they couldn't access the stopbadware list, but because there was an error in the list they received. Well, that renders pretty much everything I've said moot.

    Trentus on
  • DaedalusDaedalus Registered User regular
    edited January 2009
    FyreWulff wrote: »
    Also, someone could just DDoS the badsite lister and make everyone go to bad sites during a peak time/coordinated attack.

    So failing safely towards all sites bad > letting sites bypass it through timed attacks.

    Not really, because if every site is marked as bad, everyone just says "oh, so Google is shitting itself again" and ignores it until it's over, so it's the same as every site being marked as good.

    Daedalus on
  • DaedalusDaedalus Registered User regular
    edited January 2009
    Nevermind, that wasn't the reason anyway. They don't automatically flag everything as bad if StopBadware.org goes down, because that would be retarded.

    No, it's just that someone at Google accidentally added "/" to the bad sites list.

    Daedalus on
  • FyreWulffFyreWulff YouRegistered User, ClubPA regular
    edited January 2009
    Daedalus wrote: »
    Nevermind, that wasn't the reason anyway. They don't automatically flag everything as bad if StopBadware.org goes down, because that would be retarded.

    No, it's just that someone at Google accidentally added "/" to the bad sites list.

    Please explain to me how a failsafe is supposed to work, then.

    FyreWulff on
  • JohnDoeJohnDoe Registered User regular
    edited February 2009
    Please explain how marking every site as bad would function as a failsafe in any way.

    JohnDoe on
  • DaedalusDaedalus Registered User regular
    edited February 2009
    FyreWulff wrote: »
    Daedalus wrote: »
    Nevermind, that wasn't the reason anyway. They don't automatically flag everything as bad if StopBadware.org goes down, because that would be retarded.

    No, it's just that someone at Google accidentally added "/" to the bad sites list.

    Please explain to me how a failsafe is supposed to work, then.

    The list of bad sites isn't on StopBadware's servers, it's at Google. StopBadware.org went down after the bug, (because then every result on Google was linking to it) not before.

    Daedalus on
  • FyreWulffFyreWulff YouRegistered User, ClubPA regular
    edited February 2009
    I already know that.

    I'm just trying to figure out why people have changed the definition of the word "failsafe", which as far as I know is "to fail into a safe state".

    FyreWulff on
  • DrezDrez Registered User regular
    edited February 2009
    I mistyped a search as "BCD Cod" when I wanted "BCD Code", and google told me wikipedia could harm my computer
    Possible that they want to warn about sites which are wrongfully in the results

    Cod is a fish that, installed improperly, can harm your computer.

    Drez on
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  • liuzg150181liuzg150181 Registered User regular
    edited February 2009
    Heh, me and the wife were trying to solve a question, so we googled 'Faye Dunaway' when this error came up. Here I just thought Google really didn't like Fate Dunaway.
    I was googling 'Bill Gates' when this happened, so I thought Google had declared an all-out war on Microsoft.:P

    liuzg150181 on
  • DaedalusDaedalus Registered User regular
    edited February 2009
    FyreWulff wrote: »
    I already know that.

    I'm just trying to figure out why people have changed the definition of the word "failsafe", which as far as I know is "to fail into a safe state".

    Because if you get an alert on every single page, the user will treat the alerts the same as if they were on no pages, so both are equally bad.

    Daedalus on
  • Randall_FlaggRandall_Flagg Registered User regular
    edited February 2009
    there is one important distinction: if there is an alert on every page, the user knows that there is a possibility that any of the pages may actually be harmful

    but if there are no alerts, the user has no idea that the system has failed, so she will "know" (erroneously) that none of the pages contain malware

    it's always best for the user to know that a failure has occurred

    Randall_Flagg on
  • TofystedethTofystedeth Registered User regular
    edited February 2009
    Wow, all this technical discussion, and I thought he just meant that it marking the entire Internet as unsafe is a good idea because it's like one giant Mos Eisly, and people tend to infect themselves no matter how much we try and teach them.

    Tofystedeth on
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  • PeregrineFalconPeregrineFalcon Registered User regular
    edited February 2009
    The important part to take away from the whole discussion, though, is that people are stupid and will ignore the harmful site warnings anyways similar to how they blindly click OK/Yes/Accept/I Approve on spyware pop-ups.

    PeregrineFalcon on
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