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Google Safe Browsing can kill a startup

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Re: Google Safe Browsing can kill a startup

#411

Post by worik »

freedomben wrote: post #138
jonhohle wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking about this this week in the context of online shopping with in store delivery. My wife recently waited nearly half an hour for a “drive up” delivery where she had to check in with an app. Apparently the message didn’t make it to the store, and when she called half way into her wait she wasn’t greeted with consolation, but derision for not understanding the failure points in this workflow. It seems that…

Very poignant observation. I have run into this as well in situations in meat-space everywhere from the DMV queue to grocery pickup. Empathy and understanding for fellow humans is at an all time low, no doubt exacerbated by technologies dehumanizing us into data points and JSON objects in a queue waiting for the algorithm to service. As wonderful as tech has made our lives, it is not fully in the category of "better"…

I have not been noticing that.

I am finding the poorly paid workers who provide service to me polite and helpful.

Perhaps this is geography? Different in different places?

Re: Google Safe Browsing can kill a startup

#412

Post by TeMPOraL »

dane-pgp wrote: post #399
TeMPOraL wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It essentially is a non-aligned AI. AIs don't need to be implemented in silico . Bureaucracy is by itself a computing medium too.

That makes me wonder if someone has ever written a scientific paper proving that the bureaucratic processes in place at their company are Turing Complete. You can imagine some sort of Rule 110 cellular automaton being implemented in TPS reports.

A cellular automaton over office documents would be a nice thing to try! That said, a proof of turing-completeness of bureaucracy is relatively trivial:

  FROBNICATION QUERY      ID [#1234]

  1. Requester data
     [bunch of boxes]
  1a. (*) Details on stuffs
     [bunch of boxes]
  1b. (*) Details on different stuffs
     [bunch of boxes]
  (...)
  4. Additional documents
    - [Frobnication Registration #432]
    - [Frobnication Query #1111]

  --
  (*) - Fill section a) if $something. Fill section b) if $somethingelse.
With sections 1a/1b implementing conditional branching, and section 4 implementing storage.

Re: Google Safe Browsing can kill a startup

#413

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

CodeWriter23 wrote: post #101
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox and Safari. I know, Chrome is huge these days and it's a problem, but it's not like anything can be done about Chrome.

As @gomox alludes in his article, Firefox uses Google Safe Browsing API.

That's the whole point of my comment, yes?

Re: Google Safe Browsing can kill a startup

#414

Post by pnw_hazor »

gomox wrote: post #23
freedomben wrote: post #20

After years of seeing developments like this, getting worse and worse, it fills me with rage to think about how clearly nobody in power at Google cares. I naively used to think, "they probably don't realize what's happening and will fix it." I always try to give benefit of the doubt, especially having been on the other side so many times and seeing how 9 times out of 10 it's not malice, just incompetence, apathy, or…

Author here. I don't think it's malice on their part, but their hammer is too big to be wielded so carelessly.

That is malice.

Accidentally unleashing a process that harms people is negligence. Not caring that you are being negligent is malice.

Re: Google Safe Browsing can kill a startup

#415

Post by londons_explore »

dharmab wrote: post #258
londons_explore wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main way is via the Googlebot crawler. They also use user reports from Chrome, and links in "mark phishing" emails from Gmail. Those latter two cases the URL is considered private data, so won't be reported in webmaster tools.

We’ve seen internal firewalled URLs in the webmaster tools, so I’m not sure the private data works as intended.

Maybe there is some kind of "if multiple users see the same URL, it isn't private" logic going on.

Re: Google Safe Browsing can kill a startup

#417

Post by AviationAtom »

He talks about Google welding too much power with this. Another example is how their spam filtering can pretty prevent a business from being able to relay emails to any of their customers with a Gmail address. This has led to many people just outsourcing their mail relaying to companies like SendGrid, to lessen the chance of having their emails blocked by Google.

Re: Google Safe Browsing can kill a startup

#418

Post by Retric »

pryce wrote: post #352
teamspirit wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here-here! I really wish there was more human involvement in a lot of these seemingly arbitrary AI-taken actions. Everything from app review to websites and more. This heavy reliance on automated systems has led us down this road. Shoot, keep it, just give us the option to guarantee human review - with of course transparency. We don't need anymore "some human looked at this and agreed, the decisions is final, goodbye…

It's interesting how closely the unfolding of this awful scenario has followed an entirely predictable path based on the shifting incentives: now hundreds of thousands of businesses face the same massive hazard of blocklisted without adequate human review, and with mediocre options to respond to it if it occurs. Without a shift in incentives, its unlikely the outlook will improve. Unless the organisations affected (a…

Blacklisting a site incorrectly seems like a perfectly adequate reason for a defamation lawsuit. So, I think the real issue is with the legal system.

Re: Google Safe Browsing can kill a startup

#419

Post by cadence- »

jefftk wrote: post #244
cadence- wrote: post #169

I can confirm everything that was said in that article. I run a free dynamic dns service (freemyip.com) and every time someone creates a subdomain that later hosts some questionable material, Google will immediately block my whole domain. Their response time for clearing these up varies from a few hours to two weeks. It feels completely random. I once had a malicious subdomain that I removed within two hours, yet the…

Have you considered requesting that your domain be added to the public suffix list? https://publicsuffix.org/ If subdomains of your domain should be treated as independent sites, the public suffix list is (sadly) how you communicate that to browsers. (Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)

This is the first time I hear about https://publicsuffix.org/ Will definitely check it out. Maybe that will help me solve this problem. Thanks a lot!

Re: Google Safe Browsing can kill a startup

#420

Post by zbrozek »

xmprt wrote: post #301
zerkten wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why user uploads are worth some thought and consideration. File uploads normally gets treated as a nuisance by developers because it can become kind of fiddly even when it works and you are getting file upload bugs from support. It normally isn't that much of a challenge to mitigate the issues, but other things get priorities. Companies end up leaving pivots to XSS attacks and similar bugs too.

Google has a great service for this called Checksum. You upload a file checksum and it validates it against the database of all known bad checksums that might flag your website as unsafe. The pricing is pretty reasonable too and you can proxy file uploads through their service directly. I'm actually not telling the truth but at what point did you realize that? And what would be the implications if Google actually did…

Real shame if this domain got blocked because of a contraband file, eh? Just pay us and we'll make sure you don't have any problems.
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