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My experience being blocked by Google Safe Browsing (2022)

brennan.io

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Re: My experience being blocked by Google Safe Browsing (2022)

#3
post #2

Yikes, giving Google the power to block any website to the majority of humankind may not be the best idea.

Even worse, the data is crowd sourced. I've been playing whack-a-mole with this service for over a year now. Strongly suspecting that this is negative SEO. It is temporarily unblocked, then in the next week the entire domain is re-flagged.

Re: My experience being blocked by Google Safe Browsing (2022)

#4
We had a similar issue, but unfortunately this is not as easy at it seems.

google will remove you from that database fo bad websites but many other crap antivirus/security software will not automatically refresh it. So you will get report from customer A that the website is not safe, you then have to ask for what security program they use, then you need to find the form on those people website , it is not easy since a big securityu company might have different websites and support pages for different stuff so you need to find the right one to submit a form or open a ticket.

And one of this big security companies(unfortunately I do not remember which of them) had a bug on their form, when you submit it it would show an error, and that was for a few weeks.

If anyone works at this "security" companies, make the fuck sure that adding some website on the list should be as easy to also remove it from the list. if you use Google lists to add a site then use same fucking list to remove them, and make a fucking form that works.

Re: My experience being blocked by Google Safe Browsing (2022)

#5
I feel the "i want my friends and family to be safe" is similar to the "but think of the kids!" excuse.

Maybe its some kind of a Stockholm Syndrome variant of people using Chrome, but its definitely not healthy.

I don't actually believe that it has blocked that many people from being phished, and I doubt that all the entries on that list are malicious. It seems like a system that was designed by someone to simply get a pat on the back and a promotion, and then not touched again.

The point of hosting yourself, and not making another facebook/youtube page, or discord server, is really to be free of their terms, control, etc. Your browser itself blocking self hosted sites is such a malicious attack of that.

Re: My experience being blocked by Google Safe Browsing (2022)

#6
post #5

I feel the "i want my friends and family to be safe" is similar to the "but think of the kids!" excuse. Maybe its some kind of a Stockholm Syndrome variant of people using Chrome, but its definitely not healthy. I don't actually believe that it has blocked that many people from being phished, and I doubt that all the entries on that list are malicious. It seems like a system that was designed by someone to simply get…

Good points. Malicious actors doing actual abuse can just rinse and repeat with new domain names.

Re: My experience being blocked by Google Safe Browsing (2022)

#9
post #7

> hosted a Mastodon server on the domain Mastodon is often used to distribute illegal content. If you self host you need to be ready to deal with this stuff. Like with self hosted SMTP server. Not saying it is good or bad, just reality!

> It’s mostly for me and friends I know personally – nothing like the bigger, public ones.

I'd agree with you if it had thousands of users, but not when the user count is 8. If you have 8 users on your SMTP server, damn easy to know with certainty if any of them did anything that might be considered malicious.

Re: My experience being blocked by Google Safe Browsing (2022)

#10
Do we know what categories a website to be part of the 'safe browsing' list? Did the author confirm that his similarly designed mastodon server was the culprit or just a hunch?

I didn't realise Google safe browsing extended beyond google products. In a way, it makes me think about what other products have ties in to google.

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