Google has started warning people when search results could potentially lead them to malicious code.
The search giant is using data from the Stop Badware Coalition to flag sites that are potentially host to malicious software. Google, along with Sun and Chinese PC maker Lenovo, announced support for the group in January.
People who attempt to go to a Web site that has been identified as risky by the coalition are taken to a warning page.
“Warning — the site you are about to visit may harm your computer!” the page states in bold type, then suggesting users can “learn more about malware and how to protect yourself at StopBadware.org“.
Seems reasonable. It will be interesting to see which sites get cranky about this.
LOVE IT.
NOW, if sites like MSN would double check the ADVERTS displayed on their site.
So what they Have another company supply them and randomize them. MSN dont check them for bots/virus.
Try a fresh install on their front page, with IE4…WHAM…
Why wouldn’t Google just delete these sites from the search results? I guess the downside of organizing all the worlds information is that you spend a whole lot of resources organizing all the bad information along with the good and presenting it and now you have to spend more resources sorting through it and rating it. Bad links make a bad chain, so Google is sort of the ball with the bad chain. Google does control all the nodes in the chain, which the malware writer is certain of and attempting to exploit. Anonymity seems to be a good safeguard againt malware and idenity theft or other problems with malicious content. If you eliminate anonymity you can control things like click fraud by identifying abusive users. Google knows more about you and little about who is writing the malware or do they? You are doing nothing wrong, just using the Internet and you have no privacy and the malware fraudsters have total privacy in which to operate. Google can say, we warned you so don’t look at us. Google isn’t doing anything other than presenting the evil, which means it isn’t doing it and is keeping with it’s no evil policy. Google seems to be becoming a media copyright-enforcement organization or at least a policeman directing the traffic. Look for more warnings ahead.
This is interesting. Open source P2P with MUTE. “MUTE uses a variable number of intermediary nodes for each transfer, with the network topology dictating how long each transfer chain is. No matter how many nodes in a transfer chain are controlled by the adversary, the adversary can never be sure that it controls all of the nodes in the chain. Thus, the adversary can never obtain the identity of the uploader or downloader with any degree of certainty.”
“MUTE can certainly be used for other anonymous communication applications.”
The bottomline is that corporations, the Chinese government and certain recording industry executives don’t like anonymous communications very much. The rest of us don’t care, we just upload, download watch and listen. A big WARNING tends to stop people and tries to control the Internet if that is at all possible. Google seems to be crying wolf with this sort of thing and when you cry wolf enough the wolves usually show up in larger numbers and they huff and the puff and the may blow your house down. If they can find your house. Thanks to Google they will be led right to it and Google will be saying we warned you guys. Then the wolves will retreat back into the woods and Google won’t be able to find them. You’ll be shit out of luck as the saying goes.
Jim, if you tried a little harder, you could have made your post even LARGER than it was.
Sorry, I didn’t get past “Why wouldn’t Google just delete….” Sorry, blame it on the attention deficit, MTV generation.
I guess short blurbs are all the rage. We are all becoming like politicians, communicating in ten second speeches. I guess people just want to read tags and taglines and be done with it. Google gives you 1,889,000,783,000 results in 0.02 seconds and people can’t take the time to read anything beyond ten words. If you write too much, you are shutdown and told not to write too much. Maybe there is too much writing being done. If you slap a Creative Commons logo on it, it could run on forever and everybody will praise it and share it. If you copyright it, they’ll all steal it and republish it because they can and by the way screw you. If you don’t do either, the solution is to not write much of anything. Just make sure it is formatted so the SEO gimmick gets it a good Google ranking and it serves more ads that get more clicks.
Uh, if you write too much — on someone else’s blog — you’ll probably get edited for space. It happens to some of us, once in a while.
Don’t like it? Get your own blog.
Thank you god
Here’s one more thing for people to sue Google over. First it was, “You destroyed my business by giving my site a poor page rank!”, and now it’s going to be, “You destroyed my business by flagging my site as malware!”.
As soon as the first sites start crying foul and Google publishes the offending malware, look for a lot of sites to clean up. I don’t expect Google to back down from a few legal threats. They are still trying to overcome the bad publicity from the China censorship.
I’m waiting to see if MicroSoft.com ends up with a malware flag.
What would be cool??
Is if Search engines started doing AV, and anti BOT scanning of Sites.
Insted of just Spider searching them for content.
THEn set up the warnings, or send them to the SITE to warn THEM, that THEIR site will NOT be posted in search UNTIL they kill the virus and bots.
Very good idea. A Google Images search took me to a page which downloaded a hostile executable SEVERAL times. It never actually loaded and ran and was caught by AVG.
I sent the idea to Google…
Also suggest they Tag sites as safe, and have THERE OWN AV and Antibot, software running on THAT taged site.
Cool idea..
HOPE they do it.
This is exactly what the free browser add-on McAffee SiteAdvisor has been doing for a few months, which works excellently. (siteadvisor.com)