New Mandala

9 responses so far ↓

• 1 Charles F. // Jul 19, 2009 at 12:30 pm

  “This site may harm your computer” is generated when several complaints are received by Google.
  It’s been most often used to try and steer traffic away from conservative blogs.

• 2 MongerSEA // Jul 19, 2009 at 1:56 pm

  With all due respect, a king of Thailand could suggest finger painting as “the way forward” and receive the typical full measure of uncritical, sycophantic endorsement from the Thai populace and media. The only thing that is “sufficient” in these misguided notions is that the lower classes be sufficiently numerous and productive to continue to enrich those who hold their leash. For the grandees of the moneyed and political classes it remains a “Surfeit Economy”: gluttony, venality, and very much business as usual.

• 3 Andy // Jul 20, 2009 at 7:00 am

  “This site may harm your computer” has nothing to do with the contents of the website, it solely is about the fact that the site has been noticed to spread malware by Google. And this should be taken seriously, not long ago I caught myself a virus just by browsing the web, even I had an up-to-date virus scanner and using Firefox which normally is more safe.

  With the latest run of infected websites with the Gumblar virus quite a lot of Thai websites got this warning, and not few of them kept it because the webmaster either does not notice, does not care or is not around at all.

• 4 Charles F. // Jul 20, 2009 at 10:46 am

  What Andy says for Thailand may be true, but in the U.S. it is abused by people attempting to squelch free speech on conservative blogs.

  It is common knowledge that Google can be manipulated by those with an agenda.

• 5 MongerSEA // Jul 20, 2009 at 2:13 pm

  Charles F. should do more research before he makes such broad claims.

  An incident earlier this year caused all of Google’s search results to display the malware warning; conservative sites, liberal sites and those with no political stance alike. The problem — either a programming error or a hack — lasted for a little over an hour.

  But during that interval several conservative blogs and opinion sites came to the mistaken conclusion that they had been singled out, either by not properly researching the extent of the problem or as an implementation of their own agenda.

  Furthermore it is not possible for anyone to cause Google’s results for a given site to display the malware warning simply by complaining about them to Google. It is true that Google does accept complaints about suspected malicious sites which attempt “drive-by-downloads” as well as discovering them by analysis of the sites it crawls.

  But in either case the analytical process is the same: the site is visited with a popular web browser (generally the most recent version of Internet Explorer) running within a virtual machine, the behaviour of the site and the response of the browser and operating system are analyzed with regards to loading or installation of executables, scripts or redirects, or changes to the registry, and only upon failing those tests would a site be labelled with the malware warning.

• 6 Charles F. // Jul 20, 2009 at 2:53 pm

  So, what you’re staing then is that the terms, Google Bombing” and “Googlewashing, and their many variants are just make believe??

  Perhaps MongerSEA should do more research.

  Of all the search engines, Google is the most vulnerable to hacks, manipulations and spoofs. Google has admitted as much.

• 7 Dan M // Jul 21, 2009 at 1:20 pm

  Well, I for one think it is funny in a manner unrelated to my odd political persecution theories. At least, no more related than usual where the politics of Thailand are concerned.

• 8 MongerSEA // Jul 21, 2009 at 2:37 pm

  What I am stating, Charles F., if you will please stop hyperventilating and permit your eyes to focus and your grey matter to re-oxygenate, is that unless you can gain control of a website and alter it’s content so that it delivers a malicious payload or make a malicious redirect, you cannot influence whether or not the site will acquire the malware warning in Google’s search results.

  This has nothing at all to do with “Google Bombing” and “Googlewashing”. By unnecessarily conflating these entirely disparate phenomena you only risk perpetuating confusion among people with less technical understanding than yourself, presuming there is one of course.

• 9 Taro Mongkoltip // Jul 24, 2009 at 6:00 pm

  Charles F., are you one of those people who believed that the all computer would die at year 2000? LOL

  Thanks MongerSEA that’s the right explaination of what exactly happened to the website.

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