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Google Safe Browsing can kill a startup

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Re: Google Safe Browsing can kill a startup

#261

Post by Bakary »

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…

I'd go a step further and claim that most tech companies are ultimately a threat to people's freedom and happiness. Not the tech itself, but the people that wield and profit from it.

Re: Google Safe Browsing can kill a startup

#262

Post by yuriko_boyko »

vaduz wrote: post #225
rottingfruit wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a weak take. Are we saying that any feature built into a web browser is desirable by virtue of the products popularity? 99% of chrome users use it because they recognize the interface from school laptops. Do you really want to live in this world where massive corporations can put whatever they want in their products and the justification is “yeah well people still downloaded it?”

No, we are saying that a site owner should not get to choose which features of the browser the users decide to use. It's the same reason why HN is dogpiling on any site that announces "Only works in Google Chrome", "Best viewed in Safari" or, for older users, "Designed for IE". One of the reasons why users decided to jump ship to browsers implemneting more advanced security features (which invariably including some s…

The problem is that the process is opaque so you aren't even given a hint as to why the site is blacklisted. Security filters, fine, but at least tell the developers what the violation is so that it can be fixed. It's the same in the play store controversies, the developers aren't told what's wrong, the app is just taken down. This lack of transparency is the real issue.

Re: Google Safe Browsing can kill a startup

#263

Post by ghaff »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #237
ghaff wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure it's even attributable to stupidity (necessarily) as attributable to automation or, more long-windedly, attributable to the fact that automation at scale will sometimes scale in wacky ways and said scale also makes it nearly impossible--or at least unprofitable--to insert meaningful human intervention into the loop. Not Google, but a few months back I suddenly couldn't post on Twitter. Why? Who knows. I…

>said scale also makes it nearly impossible--or at least unprofitable--to insert meaningful human intervention into the loop. Retail and hotels and restaurants can insert meaningful human intervention with less than 5% profit margins, but a company with consistent $400k+ profit per employee per quarter can not? https://csimarket.com/stocks/singleEfficiencyeit.php?code=GO... This is what I'm talking about in my origin…

Fair enough. Scale does make things harder but my $FINANCIAL_INSTITUTION has a lot of scale too and, if I have an issue with my account, I'll have someone on the phone sooner rather than later.

Re: Google Safe Browsing can kill a startup

#264

Post by nojvek »

ethbr0 wrote: post #247
at_a_remove wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jon Williams, circa 1987, wrote a story of a far-flung humanity's future in "Dinosaurs," in which humans had been engineered into a variety of specialized forms to better serve humanity. After nine million years of tweaking, most of them are not too bright but they are perfect at what they do. Ambassador Drill is trying to prevent a newly discovered species, the Shar, from treading on the toes of humanity, because if…

> Google's desire for scale, scale, scale, meant that interactions must be handled through The Algorithms That's fine when you're a plucky growth startup. Less fine when you run half the internet. If Google doesn't want to admit it's a mature business and pivot into margin-eating, but risk-reducing support staffing, then okay: break it back up into enough startup-sized chunks that the response failure of one isn't an…

I agree. Google is such a large behemoth who actively tries to avoid customer support if they can. Splitting it to smaller business with a bit of autonomy and not having to rely on ad money fueling everything else means those smaller businesses have to give a shit about customers and compete on even ground.

Same applies to Facebook and other tech companies. The root issue is taking huge profits from area of business into other avenues which compete with the market on unfair ground (or out right buying out competition)

However anti-trust in US has eroded significantly.

Re: Google Safe Browsing can kill a startup

#265

Post by joseph_grobbles »

gomox wrote: post #250
joseph_grobbles wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess. Odds are that there was something , and you have every reason to state otherwise. You're really focused on the URL, but a whole domain will be tagged when random queries are met with content dispositions with malware, which can be automatically flagged by the search engine. As an aside, your commentary about Google alerting to phishing emails seems like you're misunderstanding and trying to use this to furth…

I am not misunderstanding anything, the fact that Google's own legitimate emails are flagged as phishing by their own filters is pretty telling about the reliability of the whole thing. The fact that you can come up with a plausible explanation to why it happened doesn't make it any less damning. But of course, they don't flag google.com as a spammy domain and stop all emails coming from it, right? PS: Im not sure ex…

"the fact that Google's own legitimate emails are flagged as phishing by their own filters is pretty telling about the reliability of the whole thing"

It detects blacklisted URLs in emails and sends warnings, retroactively given that sites are caught some indeterminate time after they might have been communicated (flagging if you have interacted with the email and thus might have been compromised). It seems like it was perfectly reliable.

That isn't damning at all, and it should embarrass you that you cited that, seemingly confused about the reason.

"Im not sure exactly what you are disputing"

I'm saying that we have zero reason to believe you (but reasons to not believe you given that you're redacting things that don't need to be redacted). People caught in the nets of things like this -- through their malice, carelessness, incompetence, etc -- always claim innocence.

Re: Google Safe Browsing can kill a startup

#266

Post by ThePhysicist »

So, essentially they let someone host malicious content on their CDN, which led to Google blocking it. I don't see the scandal here. Also, it seems Google fixed the issue within 2 hours, which is quite good TBH.

There are many open-source & commercial IOC lists in distribution from vendors like Crowdstrike, Team CYMRU etc., a lot of them are being fed into SIEM systems, firewalls and proxies at companies. If you happen to end up on one of these lists it can take months or years to clear your reputation.

Re: Google Safe Browsing can kill a startup

#267

Post by catlifeonmars »

jdsalaro wrote: post #120
hctaw wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd add to this that willfully refusing to remedy stupid can be an act of malice.

That's a very good point. Actually, I just thought about something in the context of this conversation: one's absolute top priority, both in life and tech, should be to stop the bleeding[1] that emerges from problematic circumstances. Whether those problematic circumstances, harm, arise due to happenstance, ignorance, negligence, malice, mischievousness, ill intentions or any other possible reason is ancillary to the…

I agree with your sentiment. Modeling intent is useful in two cases: (1) predicting the future, and (2) in court. When modeling intent has no predictive power, it’s generally irrelevant, as you said.

Re: Google Safe Browsing can kill a startup

#269

Post by jacquesm »

kyledrake wrote: post #172
jacquesm wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi Kyle, I still have the reocities.com domain, would you like to have it? If so I'll be happy to donate it free of charge.

From the Geocities archive? Yeah actually, send me an email let's talk about it.

Yes, indeed. Ok, will do.

Edit: sent.

Re: Google Safe Browsing can kill a startup

#270

Post by emayljames »

dharmab wrote: post #210
psyc wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pardon my ignorance as I have few years of web dev experience. What exactly does it mean to store data on a domain? Does he mean serve data via a domain URL? And if so, how does Google have discovery of that data?

We’re pretty sure they get reports from Chrome. A security researcher at my workplace was running an exploit against a dev instance as part of their secops role and got the domain flagged, despite the site being an isolated and firewalled instance not accessible to the internet.

Yes, I have noticed that creating a brand new dev domain with crawler blocking norobots file, it is not found on any search on Google, until I open the dev url in Chrome, then bam! watch as their crawler starts trying to search through the site just from opening the url in Chrome.

This is why I never use Chrome. They scrape the Google Safe Browsing sent from chrome browsers and just do not care about privacy.

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