Nearly every Google search for me says “This site may harm your computerâ€. 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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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
PSN | Steam
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I've got a spare copy of Portal, if anyone wants it message me.
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
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?"
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?"
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.
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.
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!
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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
Looking for a DX:HR OnLive code for my kid brother.
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Suddenly it had me doubting whether in fact the BBC website was a trustworthy site, the power of google man.
---
I've got a spare copy of Portal, if anyone wants it message me.
Possible that they want to warn about sites which are wrongfully in the results
Good plan in all honesty.
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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.
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.
It wouldn't let me click anywhere to continue to the website. I had to copy paste the URL it found to get there.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
Cod is a fish that, installed improperly, can harm your computer.
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.
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
Can trade TF2 items or whatever else you're interested in. PM me.