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My experience being blocked by Google Safe Browsing (2022)

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

#31

Post by londons_explore »

I have never seen a 'wrong' case of safebrowsing warning...

Always after sufficient investigation I find that the server has been broken into and there are some malicious PHP files sitting in some directory named '.system' or something similar.

Either that or the site allows user uploads and some user has uploaded some malicious JavaScript crypto miner or something.

On a mastodon server, it is hard to check all the content posted by all the users... But I'd bet somewhere there is something malicious that safebrowsing detected.

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

#32

Post by qup »

_nalply wrote: post #25
efdee wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often click links on phishing mails I get just for fun, and more often than not they result in webpages being blocked by Chrome. Anecdotal, but there you go.

This is a bit dangerous because of zero-days. If you do this in a throw-away isolated virtual machine, this is probably safe.

Fun times when you have to use "probably" there to be accurate.

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

#33

Post by mrjin »

I cannot have such BS any more. So I deployed something on my home server and exposed it on a port just above 10000. And I tried to access it with Chrome, and it was blocked coz it on an unusual port!! So obviously one of them had to go. So Chrome went away from my network.

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

#34

Post by efdee »

_nalply wrote: post #25
efdee wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often click links on phishing mails I get just for fun, and more often than not they result in webpages being blocked by Chrome. Anecdotal, but there you go.

This is a bit dangerous because of zero-days. If you do this in a throw-away isolated virtual machine, this is probably safe.

Very much true. It's almost always a specific type of phishing that tries to get me to enter bank credentials, usually not really serving malware. But you make a good point.

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

#36

Post by op00to »

efdee wrote: post #19
lionkor wrote: 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…

I often click links on phishing mails I get just for fun, and more often than not they result in webpages being blocked by Chrome. Anecdotal, but there you go.

A digital running of the bulls!

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

#38

Post by esprehn »

lionkor wrote: 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…

> I don't actually believe that it has blocked that many people from being phished

The data says the opposite, the safe browsing list is very effective* which is why many other browsers and systems use the same list to block malicious pages.

Google publishes data about the frequency of warnings displayed too: https://transparencyreport.google.com/safe-browsing/overview

* Of course it could be better.

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

#39

Post by branon »

On mobile (Android) it's different. You cannot continue past the warning in Firefox Daylight (or Chrome, of course).

about:config is also walled off in every mobile Firefox build except Nightly - and even then, the "safe browsing" keys toggle back every time the app restarts.

Android WebView listens to the safe browsing list too, so you can have native apps open up with blood-red warning screens which is very uncomfortable on mobile.

Don't think I've ever seen a GSB warning page that _wasn't_ a false-positive. Google also still links out to https://www.stopbadware.org/ on some of their GSB webpages, even though the site has been dead for ages.

It has the feel of a system staffed _exclusively_ by robots. This isn't necessarily a bad thing (Google does an overall good job) but it has its blind spots for sure.

Self-hosters getting sucker punched offline for a day or two isn't the worst (it happened to me just the other week). I get it, overall it's probably worth the collateral. I also get that mobile should _probably_ be protected more aggressively. But if you are on Android, I don't think there's any way to meaningfully disable it unless you are root.

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

#40

Post by Eddy_Viscosity2 »

arnaudsm wrote: post #2

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

I agree, but also what's the alternative. A complete free-for-all doesn't work because malicious actors be malicious and a majority of users aren't competent to protect themselves against such threats. So we need something, if not google, then it would be something else. We can't trust private corporations because of potential for conflicts of interests (between users and profit motives) and we don't seem to want to trust government bodies to do this because then it would be censorship (conflict between users and political motives). What else is there?
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