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Google Safe Browsing can kill a startup

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Re: Google Safe Browsing can kill a startup

#551

Post by alexcohn »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #471
CrazyCatDog wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Another road to hell paved with good intentions. Once everyone’s paying, who’s to stop them from pocketing the money instead? “After careful review, we’ve concluded that the Electronic Frontier Foundation no longer aligns with the goals of Google or its parent company Alphabet Inc. to the extent we require from recipients of our Freedom Fund. We will place these funds in a separate account and use them in ways we bel…

Worse, getting such money flow, EFF will get corrupt very soon.

Re: Google Safe Browsing can kill a startup

#552

Post by TimTheTinker »

alexcohn wrote: post #551
TimTheTinker wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another road to hell paved with good intentions. Once everyone’s paying, who’s to stop them from pocketing the money instead? “After careful review, we’ve concluded that the Electronic Frontier Foundation no longer aligns with the goals of Google or its parent company Alphabet Inc. to the extent we require from recipients of our Freedom Fund. We will place these funds in a separate account and use them in ways we bel…

Worse, getting such money flow, EFF will get corrupt very soon.

Absolutely. There’s nothing like guaranteed money or power to corrupt people.

Re: Google Safe Browsing can kill a startup

#553

Post by pas »

sfg wrote: post #71

If their claim is false, then is it, in any jurisdiction, libelous? Maybe, legislation to bring consequences for false claims will help ensure algorithms, and the support teams that monitor them, do a better job. In an internet focused world, especially one with lock downs, wiping sites off of the internet with false claims is a heinously bad act.

This seems like something the FTC should be looking into, abuse of market position.

Re: Google Safe Browsing can kill a startup

#554

Post by WalterGR »

DanBC wrote: post #157
fortran77 wrote: post #31

The story he links to, about the "Online Slang Dictionary" being removed from google search because the founder of Urban Dictionary was friends with googlers (true) and (allegedly) used his influence is fascinating: http://onlineslangdictionary.com/pages/google-panda-penalty/

You may want to read these posts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9977372 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5419890 And this too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24109168

My plans to trickle out details of my conversation with the Google employee were put on hold due to a massive change in my life responsibilities due to the novel coronavirus, but it’s my intention to resume soon.

As I say on the website, this will culminate in my releasing the MBOX formatted file of the conversation, with full headers.

Re: Google Safe Browsing can kill a startup

#555

Post by tatersolid »

dheera wrote: post #234
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…

Google Safe Search is only half the story. Another huge problem is Google's opaque and rash decisions about what sites throw up warnings in Chrome. I once created a location-based file-transfer service called quack.space [0] very similar to Snapdrop, except several years before they existed. Unfortunately the idiot algorithms at Chrome blocked it, throwing up a big message that the site might contain malware. That wa…

Isn’t it possible your service was hosting malware and you just didn’t know? This same problem killed Firefox Send: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/what-happened-firefox-s...

Re: Google Safe Browsing can kill a startup

#556

Post by gomox »

koalaman wrote: post #550
gomox wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here - I don't underestimate the complexity of the task that Google Safe Browsing tries to accomplish. But: Do you believe there is no room for improvement in an automated, opaque system with clear evidence of malfunction, that quite succinctly decides if hundreds of people go unemployed when their company tanks for nothing other than an incorrectly set threshold on some algorithm? That is the real question to…

I do agree that there's room for improvement. There's always room for improvement, but there are also limits to the transparency one should provide for an anti-abuse system. It's difficult for anybody except for an expert in this area to say what would be a safe and satisfactory way to expose appeal and remediation for false positives. In the example from the story it looks like the turn around time was just an hour…

> It's not Google's responsibility to protect the internet and provide a free anti-abuse database for other browser vendors, and yet Google does do this at significant cost. The fact that they don't do it perfectly is not a rationale for killing it or providing it with infinite resources.

I think that's a naive perspective. Google did not create the database to be nice to other vendors, and it also did not make it available to them for that purpose.

An Internet-wide blacklist represents strategic leverage over competitors (or maybe even dissonant voices, should the need arise) and an massive source of data collection probe points. These facts were certainly brought up internally and deemed worth the risk when the massive legal liability of this product was assessed.

Therefore, because of the pervasiveness of this system, it needs to be handled responsibly. They are not doing anyone a favor by making sure it functions correctly. Google is well aware of this, because they don't need regulators and lawmakers gaining yet another excuse to try and dismantle them.

Re: Google Safe Browsing can kill a startup

#558

Post by emayljames »

asiachick wrote: post #441
emayljames wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You realize that robots.txt is an "on your honor" system and that any one can write a script that doesn't look at robots.txt and post anything they find to the internet and that therefore other sites could find your site via 3rd party data. Chrome does not do what you claim it does

I have trialed this several times, not using chrome and everytime I then use it, the site can be found on google. Remember, these sites are completely unlinked and fresh URLs. So, yeah it really does..
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