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Twitter Marks Clean Sites As Harmful, Breaks Links
starglider29a writes "Yesterday, a website I maintain that has a Twitter presence encountered an 'unsafe' warning when clicking on the tweets. 'This link has been flagged as potentially harmful.' After scanning the site and its database, then checking with Google and third-party site scanners, I found no evidence of harm. At noon, The Atlantic posted an article which describes the same issue with the Philadelphia City Paper. 'Perhaps most frustrating of all is that Twitter has not been particularly responsive to the paper's plight.' If the warnings are incorrect, how does Twitter justify this libel?"
If we report it every time any website doesn't work right, like Obamacare or Twitter, we'll be here all day constantly reading about bug on random website X.
Software breaks, it's only really newsworthy if it breaks in novel or spectacular ways.
Anybody who uses a link-shortening service especially for the purposes of complying with a totally arbitrary character limit, deserves what they get.
Seriously. What is a 'link shortening service' except a way to add another layer of quasi-DNS (except under the control of, probable analytics surveillance of, and subject to any uptime failures, retention limits, etc. of, a single entity) to the process of accessing something on the internet? Even better, since it isn't real DNS, it lacks all of the relatively mature, implementation-agnostic, tools for dealing with DNS and its issues, its behavior can vary nontrivially between providers (so if you aren't handling the shortened link exclusively with a common web browser, it may not work as expected, unlike DNS resolution), and it's a fantastic way to hide phishing and malware from the casual.
You can't really do without one layer of DNS; because remembering IPs is a pain (and tricks like round-robin load balancing are crazy useful); but what kind of sick masochist voluntarily adds additional layers of crippled-semi-DNS?
Really? You jump immediately to "sue them!"? Even the submitter calls it "libel" right out of the gate. What the hell is wrong with people anymore? Twitter is under no obligation to link you to anything at all. When sites like Twitter start getting sued every time there's a broken link (or a warning that a link may be to an infected site), they'll just stop parsing links altogether to avoid liability. Enjoy your cut-n-paste web browsing experience from then on.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
because they have no control over what loads on the site that loads ads from the 3rd party ad network, but can warn people before browsing the site that loads the ads from the 3rd party ad network that jack built.
Actually, I've found not being stupid is a good way to get modded down. You gotta be careful to be utterly inane if you want karma.
Before you go on a tangent and claim it's only big brother tinfoil hat censorship, let me give a list of reasons to consider it possible. Without answers from Twitter and other sites that block, claiming "whoops" is no more and nor less valid than the subject (censorship). Even with answers, it's not beyond many of these companies to outright lie, so we should be scrutinizing their answers.
1. Money. Google/Twitter may not have pay links on the site and see no revenue from click ads. While this may not be the only cause of a block, it sure could impact how fast they respond to fixing a site blocked.
2. Group Pressure. We have seen this with numerous groups, they have a couple people flooding complaints against a site, broadcast, or print article that they don't like. We have also seen this from groups that are not Religious, so don't just blame those idiots from Westboro Baptist Church.
3. Appeasing Big Brother. The NYT, CNN, and others have had numerous whistle blowers telling you that these companies censor works that the Government does not find favorable. It would be safe to assume that they also censor on their own prior to receiving a stop order from the administration.
4. Big Brother. This comes in so many forms today with our massive and intrusive Government that it can not be discounted. Many of these people share resources, so it's not going to be hard to use this network to block content people don't want out. Yes there big ole maps that shows how all of these massive companies and governments are tied together. Since there are bunches of these covering various categories I'll let you search and look at them all.
Disclaimer: I'm not saying that all 4 of these things happened here, or that even 1 of them happened. I'm claiming that to not consider it possible is rather idiotic given everything know. Anyone that blindly trusts one of these large technical companies or a Government agency today is a fool. The only way to start breaking up the corruption is to question everything, scrutinize everything, and of course report when bad things happen on every available channel in order to avoid some of the blocking.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
They can link or not link all day but guess what, it's illegal for me to stand outside a restaurant and tell people that they're doing something illegal and harmful inside and that they shouldn't go inside when that isn't actually true. It's the same on the internet.
When a large, unresponsive company leaves an annoying bug in place without any response or explanation and it's impossible to reach their technical support about getting it fixed, often times the best way to get someone at the company to acknowledge it is to report it on tech news.