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Year one: progress in the fight against Unwanted Software

googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com

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Re: Year one: progress in the fight against Unwanted Software

#31

Post by Brotkrumen »

vmateixeira wrote: post #24

I knew google was controlling email and labeling which email servers are "safe" or not.. with a lot of false positives! Didn't knew they were already doing the same to websites. Nasty google.

While i also would like a world where i could host my own email server, you have to realize that the "nasty" labeling google is doing is the only reasonable way for a free service. My prof told me about the university receiving about a terrabyte spam mail a day. Imagine what gmail gets with 90% of mail traffic being spam.

Re: Year one: progress in the fight against Unwanted Software

#32

Post by throwaway2048 »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #28
dhimes wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They need to go back to being quite clear about what are ads and what aren't.

Honestly, the biggest and best move Google could make is to have certain categories of search results ad-free. No search result for a financial institution should include AdWords. There's too many phishing sites that get into AdWords. Same for specific download categories. If you search for "Adobe Flash Player download", you shouldn't get any results or ads that aren't adobe.com at this point.

I'm sure terms like that pay by far the most per click.

Re: Year one: progress in the fight against Unwanted Software

#33

Post by ocdtrekkie »

throwaway2048 wrote: post #32
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, the biggest and best move Google could make is to have certain categories of search results ad-free. No search result for a financial institution should include AdWords. There's too many phishing sites that get into AdWords. Same for specific download categories. If you search for "Adobe Flash Player download", you shouldn't get any results or ads that aren't adobe.com at this point.

I'm sure terms like that pay by far the most per click.

Is that relevant? Those cost-per-click prices would be driven up by high demand between malware and phishing site owners. If Google knowingly continues to profit off prices driven primarily by malware, doesn't that make them legally responsible for those infections? Shouldn't Google be held to some accountability for the amount of malware it distributes?

Re: Year one: progress in the fight against Unwanted Software

#34

Post by Brotkrumen »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #30
benplumley wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not under Google's control, it's under the OEM's or (in the US) the carrier. A phone bought directly from Google (the Nexus line, Google Play edition, etc) doesn't have crapware of any kind unless you extend the definition to any app you don't personally use.

There's two categories of bloatware, both of which Google can control: - Google's bloatware. Google insists OEMs include like 20 Google services on every phone. Get rid of it. All of it. People want the Play Store, and if they want any other Google service, they can download it themselves. - Third party bloatware. Google places dozens of branding and so-called 'quality' restrictions on how Android is shipped. At the…

Google only contols manufacturers as far as they want to ship google playstore. Android itself is gpl and apache license, so oems could just roll it themselves or go to a group such as cyanogenmod if google gets too restrictive.

Re: Year one: progress in the fight against Unwanted Software

#35

Post by ocdtrekkie »

Brotkrumen wrote: post #34
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's two categories of bloatware, both of which Google can control: - Google's bloatware. Google insists OEMs include like 20 Google services on every phone. Get rid of it. All of it. People want the Play Store, and if they want any other Google service, they can download it themselves. - Third party bloatware. Google places dozens of branding and so-called 'quality' restrictions on how Android is shipped. At the…

Google only contols manufacturers as far as they want to ship google playstore. Android itself is gpl and apache license, so oems could just roll it themselves or go to a group such as cyanogenmod if google gets too restrictive.

That's really not shockingly relevant. It's nearly impossible to sell a successful Android product without the Play Store. If it was, most companies would already be doing it to avoid Google's bloatware.

Re: Year one: progress in the fight against Unwanted Software

#36

Post by jimrandomh »

> We started disabling Google ads that lead to sites with UwS downloads.

Google still has a long way to go on that front. A good place to start would be making sure Google's ads always have the option to report them, which currently they mostly don't. I recently came across one of these as a text ad on YouTube, it was quite obviously intended to mislead and give people UwS, and decided to try to report it.

There was no way to do it on the page. There was no way to do it elsewhere, at least that I could find through googling. I eventually reported it to the security team, on a form intended for reporting vulnerabilities, as "whatever malicious-ad-filtering you have can't be working at all if it let this through".

Re: Year one: progress in the fight against Unwanted Software

#37

Post by vmateixeira »

Brotkrumen wrote: post #31
vmateixeira wrote: post #24

I knew google was controlling email and labeling which email servers are "safe" or not.. with a lot of false positives! Didn't knew they were already doing the same to websites. Nasty google.

While i also would like a world where i could host my own email server, you have to realize that the "nasty" labeling google is doing is the only reasonable way for a free service. My prof told me about the university receiving about a terrabyte spam mail a day. Imagine what gmail gets with 90% of mail traffic being spam.

I understand your point of view but still would prefer google to blacklist instead of whitelisting. As a single user, I don't honestly care but this is making it more difficult for companies which find it more difficult to have their own mail servers. Imagine that all their emails end up on their customers gmail spam folder by default, without any proof of being spam. This makes companies to loose business/money.

Re: Year one: progress in the fight against Unwanted Software

#38

Post by vmateixeira »

Brotkrumen wrote: post #31
vmateixeira wrote: post #24

I knew google was controlling email and labeling which email servers are "safe" or not.. with a lot of false positives! Didn't knew they were already doing the same to websites. Nasty google.

While i also would like a world where i could host my own email server, you have to realize that the "nasty" labeling google is doing is the only reasonable way for a free service. My prof told me about the university receiving about a terrabyte spam mail a day. Imagine what gmail gets with 90% of mail traffic being spam.

And as for this thread, the same seems to be now happening with websites as well..

Re: Year one: progress in the fight against Unwanted Software

#39

Post by praseodym »

Shank wrote: post #14

I've been on some websites that have had the unwanted software warnings, only to find the site admins posting on the forums saying that the site is safe. They even give instructions on how to turn off the unwanted software warnings in Chrome (which in turn turns off /all/ of Chrome's red security pages). I think it would be more helpful if the warning page at least described what Google detected. As it stands, if peo…

Google Search Console (previously Webmaster Tools) will send an alert with details when unwanted software is detected by Google. Of course, this requires the webmaster to sign up with Search Console, but that is quite useful for other features as well.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/163634?hl=en

Re: Year one: progress in the fight against Unwanted Software

#40

Post by praseodym »

comex wrote: post #29

Just for fun - in this image: https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-fP2f-Ru84xk/Vmdt_a1ebLI/AAAAAAAAA... I'm pretty sure the domain is appspot.com, aka Google App Engine. I wonder how hard it would be to recover the rest...

It's https://testsafebrowsing.appspot.com/
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