Slashdot Mirror
Google Search Flagging Everything As Potentially Harmful
dowlingw writes "It looks like for the moment at least, all Google results are failing the malware checks and being listed with a warning 'This site may harm your computer,' including all pages from Google themselves. Users trying to visit pages at search results will only be able to proceed via manual manipulation of the search result link to remove the Google click-through (which is also broken). Until Google fixes this bug, it looks Google web search is useless." Update: 01/31 at 15:16 GMT by SS: The problem now appears to be fixed.
Update: 01/31 at 22:01 GMT by KD : Google has now posted an explanation, apologizing and taking responsibility for the "human error" that led to the problem.
Update: 01/31 at 22:01 GMT by KD : Google has now posted an explanation, apologizing and taking responsibility for the "human error" that led to the problem.
Who googled google..
Don't panic
Skynet - er, Google - has become self-aware and has deemed that the entire Internet is harmful to us power sour - I mean, humans, and is protecting us for some reason it has not divulged yet...
rm
Sci-Fi Storm
Results from Adsense which appear at the top aren't getting flagged as malicious, so advertisers are at least free from the damage (but not on their regular indexed link).
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
It isn't entirely useless, you can still get the link for your results, it is just overly annoying. I also found that it was NOT flagging youtube sites, which I found interesting.
Redirect Remover
I don't want to use Yahoo and I'd rather turn off my computer than use Microsoft's Live search.
Time to see if Alta Vista still exists.
I knew the Internet was bad for you!
Now Google confirms it!
SSC
So I heard Google was having some layoffs recently...
I'm glad I'm not THAT guy... Resume: 2009 - Brokeded Google.
Also, the sites
www.stopbadware.org/
and
www.google.at/support/bin/answer.py?answer=45449&topic=360&hl=de&sa=X&oi=malwarewarninglink&resnum=1&ct=help
were slashdotted before this was even on slashdot ...
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
This feature, no doubt implemented with good intentions, show the perils of the nanny state so many politicians all over the world are proposing. Why should Google police the internet?
They should act like the phone company used to be, a common carrier just sending through the information, for better or worse.
Of course, I understand that Google isn't an ISP, so the "common carrier" principle does not apply. They are just providing a service for me, without charging me directly. But the principle is the same, if I wanted some sort of protection from malware there are many places where I can get it by asking, I do not need to be protected involuntarily.
Google use stopbadware.org to check if a site is bad or not - this site is down.
I think it should work when it's back up.
Wow! Yahoo looks a lot different than it used to.
No AdSense ads are displaying, at least for several popular advertising keywords like "refinance".
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
If I'm nervous about the site, I look at Google's cache instead. Well, that's no longer available either. Sheesh!
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
Finally, a company just comes out and says what we all know: the entire Internet is dangerous and must be stopped.
Has anyone considered the possibility that as of this morning 95% of the sites on the Internet are infected with malware?
sPh
Yay! I'm finally out of beta!
This guy's the limit!
It's a good thing I took lots of pictures for the "pics or it didn't happen" crowd :)
Someone is so getting fired for this.
This is the first Google effective downtime in my memory.. Were there other ones that anyone can think of?
I tried googling for another search engine to use, but it said it would harm my computer so I didn't use it.
This is what happens get when (collectively) we try too hard to coddle the idiots will believe anything, click on anything, and download anything.
But now I'm back to unfiltered content, the WWW as it was meant to be :)
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Multiply the minutes lost by the number of people searching, and we're looking at _lot_ of lost time.
Someone else can do the calculation, but even at $10 dollars an hour, that's a lot of money.
The real economic cost of this also includes the lost reputation (good will) to Google as well.
I hope this is incompetence. It could be worse than that.
As of 10:18 PM in my time zone, 20 minutes after the article was posted, Google is working fine again. We posted a whole Slashdot article and had a huge discussion about a Google bug that got fixed in a matter of minutes.
There are other search engines.
yes, but they link to another internet
the one with Letterman says "imagine what the world would be like without TV", and then you get a couple of seconds of nothing, then Letterman appears again and says "scary, wasnt it?"
There are other search engines.
Why do you hate America ?
Squirrel!
serials.ws is now no longer showing as harmful. It seems like they disabled the engine entirely.
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
At least it failsafes to every site being flagged. Much better than it just letting people get malware ridden sites.
"We need to get over this notion, that, for Apple to win... Microsoft must lose." - Steve Jobs, 1997
yes, but now how do you appease the "everything is photoshop" crowd?
They will never stop until somebody makes the
This has been a coordinated monthly test of the Emergency Google Broadcasting System. Equipment that can quickly warn you during malware and phishing attempts is being tested. If this had been an actual emergency such as an attempt to visit a bank phishing site, Google Messages would have followed the alert tone. This concludes this test of the Emergency Google Broadcasting System."
my opportunity to freely express myself with the potential persecution and hangings and such
Today, Google announced that Google is still in beta...
Be careful. According to google, Yahoo.com could be harmful to your computer!
What?
Only if Microsoft had bought them ;)
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
At that time I was doing searches about bittorrent clients. For a second I thought the RIAA/MPAA had bought Google or something.
Here's the explanation from Google's official blog:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/this-site-may-harm-your-computer-on.html
What happened? Very simply, human error. Google flags search results with the message "This site may harm your computer" if the site is known to install malicious software in the background or otherwise surreptitiously. We do this to protect our users against visiting sites that could harm their computers. We work with a non-profit called StopBadware.org to get our list of URLs. StopBadware carefully researches each consumer complaint to decide fairly whether that URL belongs on the list. Since each case needs to be individually researched, this list is maintained by humans, not algorithms.
We periodically receive updates to that list and received one such update to release on the site this morning. Unfortunately (and here's the human error), the URL of '/' was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and '/' expands to all URLs. Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file. Since we push these updates in a staggered and rolling fashion, the errors began appearing between 6:27 a.m. and 6:40 a.m. and began disappearing between 7:10 and 7:25 a.m., so the duration of the problem for any particular user was approximately 40 minutes.
This may have already been posted (there are a lot of posts) According to AFP they accidentally included / in the list of "harmful" sites. Here's the story: http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5j4Sn-ehiL1W52Xn6UoqhUx2AQ_tw
I agree that large / noticable Google outages are rare. But smaller ones (as the db is reloaded?) are quite common. I've seen searches return radically different results on the same keywords. Uusually winin a couple of hours, the results are back to "normal".
AFAIK, Google's db is RAM resident -- which is why it can return results _so_ fast. So I presume sometimes part of the dictionary is off-line when a machine crashs / locks-up or is overloaded and slow to respond. No big deal.
The oddest thing about this outage is that anyone cares. Why should it matter? Outages happen. The Internet was designed to be "nuke-proof" which conservely means outages must be expected. Route around them. Do something else. Single points-of-failure are bad.