Google mistakes entire web for malware A human error at Google caused its main search engine to briefly identify every site on the web as a potentially malicious destination that represented a threat to end users, the company said. Starting early Saturday morning California time, the world's largest search engine flagged each search result with the warning: "This …
Reminds me of a -sane - government official responding to a pestering about some imagined danger to public health/safety on Radio 4 years ago ...
After repeatedly telling the interviewer that there was no significant risk, that the risk was insignificant, that whilst it was theoretically possible the likelihood was negligible, the interviewer hit him with a perfect...
"Yes, bit it *is* possible, isn't it?" (=all Radio 4 listeners should begin/continue to panic)
To which the weary interviewee responded, patiently, but with the gentle sigh of someone seeking to reassure a child, "Almost everything is almost always a possibility."
Pause. Silence. End of interview.
The only certainty in life is death - even taxes are optional (NB, the British invented Income Tax - a "temporary measure" if I recall my history correctly - to pay for the Napoleonic wars; if we disinvented it, would the rest of the world follow again?)
I'm just waiting for a flurry of lawsuits to roll in... 40 min of no google referrers would be a significant chunk of change for alot of large e-commerce sites... Not to mention the click-arb sites stuck in between, and the people that rely on PPC for their business...
/bfg
There's no way Google can tell what's happened to a webpage since it was last spidered...
OK, so the pages on most well-known big domains are likely to be fairly innocuous, but once you start trawling through individual users home pages, anything could have happened in the past few months...
Then again, 99% of malware exploits Windoze boxes, and I'm typing this on a Linux box - so unless the malware is smart enough to hack the root account, I think I'm pretty safe...
Well, we covered it there at 14:35 GMT.
Then again at 14:43 and 14:53. So we were first to publication :-P~~~
(It's now 16:12 and a google news search for "google malware" (no quotes) has the earliest reference as:
Google crashes; says all Internet is bad
iTWire, Australia - 1 hour ago
Clicking on any search results takes me not to the page in question but to a Google page advising of the risks of malware. I am told I can continue on if ...GOOG)
This gestapo thing deserves a black helicopter. I were doing some happy googling when the intarwebs went dead... quick switch to yahoo to find out what google badware alliance actually is. As a result i think i'll skip on google, if i can dodge that overlord of the internets. I mean, anonymously sending an alert that isn't even researched by stopbadware.org, and your site is unreachable by the formerly blue G giant. It makes me wonder though that why oh why is the el reg not on badware list all the time, considering the people you make angry daily.
I personally think this should be a wake up call to all internet users.
I'm now starting to think "monopoly" (microsoft springs to mind), what if in 10 years time and google's beaten all other search engines into ground and this happens? Most techs would be fine but bugger me would the rest suffer.
I now firmly believe Google's access gateway to information is far to powerful right now, let alone 10 years in the future.
"Do no Evil" yeah right.
Title says it all. What a bloody great idea to castrate the Internet, which was designed from the ground up NOT to have any single points of failure, by introducing one. EU take note, this is what they'd like to have everyone use, so take the advice they give you when you're fabricating that Internet Rule Book out of whole cloth with much NaCl. [1]
I wonder if Fx3's "safe" browsing took a hit, too? I can't tell as it's turned off and the lookup URLs munged about 30 milliseconds after I install Fx on any of my systems, but IIRC that all comes from the Goog, too. If I ever decide to rummage through the code, I might just make a port that disables this "functionality" out of the box and replaces Google with Scroogle SSL as the default search plugin.
On that note, what should I call the unbranded results, since I'm not allowed to call it IncandescentVulpine for trademark reasons? I'm thinking Earthbadger, which sounds nice; wouldn't that look bloody wonderful in your httpd logs? I'll give ElReg the diff and they can call it Airvulture, in keeping with the [mystic elements][animal] naming scheme. Or I might just be a lazy bastard and go back to using Konq ;o)
[1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/15/neutrality_in_europe_analysis/
What I want to know is what yahoos stats looked like during that 45min period. I can imagine they got bombed with traffic especially since i was struggling to get their site to respond during the period.
nice screen shots... look very similar to the ones i emailed the register at 15:13.
"Google mistakes entire web for malware"
Mistakes?
40% of it wants to sell you crap you don't need, 40% of it wants to waste your time, and the other 20% is hawking viruses to take over your computer so they can sell you crap you don't need and waste your time ALL THE TIME.
I'd say Google's right on the money ;)
Sorry folks, it's my fault. I dropped the internet. Must have caused a glitch. It seems to be OK now. I'll take it back to Big Ben before something really bad happens.
PS Cade, we all know you're on a personal crusade against the Big G (yes, they ARE a big nasty corporation hell-bent to making money. Hey, guess what, the *entire* US -world?- economy is!), but putting stuff like "blocking access to the entire net" in this abstract makes you sound like a raving loonie, sorta.
The worst thing is that the standard malwear warning advises users that the requested site "may harm your computer" but that you "may continue at your own risk" but supplies no obvious method of doing so. There's no "OK" button. Unless you know to manually change the URL in your browser (or use another search engine) you're goosed.
Paris, because she likes being goosed.
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