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Google Safe Browsing can kill a startup

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Re: Google Safe Browsing can kill a startup

#451

Post by judge2020 »

teamspirit wrote: post #345
yuvalr1 wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an amazing story. It really demonstrates the way we pave our road to hell with good intentions... We should really do something about this issue, where so few companies (arguably, a single one) hold so much power over the most fundamental technology of the era.

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 feels like the need for automated systems is a result of the ever-increasing size of the world (there are now nearly 5 billion internet users[0]). For Apple, app review can take days, mainly because doing human review [consistently] well and constantly for 8 hours a day isn't easy[1], leading to staffing issues when bad reviewers get weeded out and only a small percentage of hires stick around. Outside of hiring 10,000 employees just to endlessly review phishing links for 40 hours a week, you need automation to triage these phishing sites and deal with the outcome later such as via on-demand review by a human (which worked in this case, but won't always work - humans still make mistakes). I'm not sure if there is a solution for this problem outside of just not having the safe browsing product if 'makes no errors' is a requirement.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage

1: https://www.businessinsider.com/heres-why-it-really-sucks-to...

Re: Google Safe Browsing can kill a startup

#452

Post by CrazyCatDog »

jedberg wrote: post #316

This is actually funny, because I was involved with the creation of this list, way back in 2004. The whole thing started as a way to stop phishing. I was working at eBay/PayPal at the time, and we were finding a bunch of new phishing sites every day. We would keep a list and try to track down the owners of the (almost always hacked) sites and ask them to take it down. But sometimes it would take weeks or months for t…

Simple solution = let google use their, imperfect (false-positives) filter, allow them to collect $12 / year not to be blacklisted, and google to send all revenue to the Electronic Frontier Foundation or similar internet defending foundations.

Re: Google Safe Browsing can kill a startup

#454

Post by perl4ever »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #429
perl4ever wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just paying a bill online. I had loading images turned off in my browser. So I get the checkbox captcha thing, and checking it is not enough, so I have to click on taxis, etc. Which didn't initially show because of images being off. I eventually did turn on images for the site and reload it. But at first, I was like "wait a minute, why should I have to have images on to pay a bill ?" and I clicked a bunch of th…

Genuinely-handicapped users should certainly have accommodations that allow them to pay bills using the necessary accessibility tools. It's always tricky to keep those tools from being leveraged by spammers and phishers, though, as witnessed by how TDD services for the deaf were misused in the past. Hard problem to solve in general, either through legislation or technology. But if you're an ordinary user without spec…

Once upon a time, it was not only easy to find the option to disable image loading, but you could easily load them a la carte, by right clicking on any placeholder.

With the browser I use now, it seems to only let you reenable images per-site and then you have to dig in settings to delete the exception.

There IS a Load Image menu item when I right click...but it does nothing! Neither does "Open image in new tab".

I think it's unfortunate if there is a "long tail" of features in a typical application these days that are not expected to work.

Re: Google Safe Browsing can kill a startup

#455

Post by hitekker »

at_a_remove wrote: post #96
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…

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…

> “You will have killed us,” Gram said, “destroyed the culture that we have built for thousands of years, and you won’t even give it any thought. Your species doesn’t think about what it does any more. It just acts, like a single-celled animal, engulfing everything it can reach. You say that you are a conscious species, but that isn’t true. Your every action is... instinct. Or reflex.

Good story. I can imagine what the specialized humans did to the generalist humans eons ago.

Re: Google Safe Browsing can kill a startup

#456

Post by CamperBob2 »

perl4ever wrote: post #454
CamperBob2 wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuinely-handicapped users should certainly have accommodations that allow them to pay bills using the necessary accessibility tools. It's always tricky to keep those tools from being leveraged by spammers and phishers, though, as witnessed by how TDD services for the deaf were misused in the past. Hard problem to solve in general, either through legislation or technology. But if you're an ordinary user without spec…

Once upon a time, it was not only easy to find the option to disable image loading, but you could easily load them a la carte, by right clicking on any placeholder. With the browser I use now, it seems to only let you reenable images per-site and then you have to dig in settings to delete the exception. There IS a Load Image menu item when I right click...but it does nothing! Neither does "Open image in new tab". I t…

What frustrates me personally is that there used to be a Firefox extension to suppress displaying a particular image, which is no longer available. I can't see the utility of disabling all images, but that extension was nice because you could use it to remove things you were tired of seeing like obnoxious backgrounds, avatar photos, and even some ads. Once you right-clicked on an image and told it to remove it, you'd never see it again, even in subsequent browsing sessions.

This extension died during one of Firefox's periodic Purges of Useful Functionality(tm), and I've been looking for another one ever since. So to some extent I see where you're coming from, but a general jihad against sound and images in the browser seems pretty radical.

Re: Google Safe Browsing can kill a startup

#457

Post by qwantim1 »

yuvalr1 wrote: post #325
jedberg wrote: post #316

This is actually funny, because I was involved with the creation of this list, way back in 2004. The whole thing started as a way to stop phishing. I was working at eBay/PayPal at the time, and we were finding a bunch of new phishing sites every day. We would keep a list and try to track down the owners of the (almost always hacked) sites and ask them to take it down. But sometimes it would take weeks or months for t…

This is an amazing story. It really demonstrates the way we pave our road to hell with good intentions... We should really do something about this issue, where so few companies (arguably, a single one) hold so much power over the most fundamental technology of the era.

This was the case with railroads too, only a few controlled the biggest and most transforming and business-integral tech of 1800s.

Prior to that it was those that controlled the printing presses.

...

History continues to repeat itself.

Re: Google Safe Browsing can kill a startup

#458

Post by nearbuy »

cft wrote: post #390
ehsankia wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you implying that the list no longer has a good intention? I wouldn't be surprised if there are multiple orders of magnitude more phishing and hacked websites in 2021 than there was in 2004. Even with human checking, I doubt you'll even have 0% failure rate. Is the solution to just give up on blocking phishing sites?

The solution is for the legitimate sites that are driven out of business by Google AI to sue Google for tortuous interference and libel.

This helps one group and hurts another. If Google is liable for blocking potential malware and phishing pages, they'll either stop blocking it, or adjust their algorithm to strongly err on the side of allowing phishing sites.

Businesses become safer, but more regular people will get phished.

Re: Google Safe Browsing can kill a startup

#459

Post by kovac »

ehsankia wrote: post #379
yuvalr1 wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an amazing story. It really demonstrates the way we pave our road to hell with good intentions... We should really do something about this issue, where so few companies (arguably, a single one) hold so much power over the most fundamental technology of the era.

Are you implying that the list no longer has a good intention? I wouldn't be surprised if there are multiple orders of magnitude more phishing and hacked websites in 2021 than there was in 2004. Even with human checking, I doubt you'll even have 0% failure rate. Is the solution to just give up on blocking phishing sites?

The failure rate doesn't need to be 0%. If the solution is good, at least it'll be close to 0% which means that it'd be possible for the vendor to provide better support for the small number of mistakes so that they can be clearly explained to the affected party and rectified more quickly. If the failure rate is too high to make better support infeasible, then the current solution is not really a good one and we need to consider a revision.

Re: Google Safe Browsing can kill a startup

#460

Post by nearbuy »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #78
jdsalaro wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" and all that, but after the events and the almost perfectly orchestrated behavior we've seen in the past and last couple of weeks it's becoming increasingly difficult, at least to me, to not attribute this to malice. Probably deliberate negligence is a better term. They know their systems can make mistakes, of course they do, and yet they bui…

>”never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" I keep reading this on the internet as if it’s some sort of truism, but every situation in life is not a court where a prosecutor is trying to prove intent. There is insufficient time and resources to evaluate each and every circumstance to determine each and every causative factor, so we have to use heuristics to get by and make the best gu…

It's a truism not because people are never malicious, but because we tend to see agency where there is none. Accidents are seen as intentional. This tendency leads to conspiracy theories, superstitions, magical thinking, etc. We're strongly biased towards interpreting hurtful actions as malice.
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