Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

This Site Will Not Harm Your Computer!

Using the Google search engine this morning, I noticed that every search I did brought up sites flagged with the 'This site may harm your computer' warning.  I even Googled 'Google' and got the same result!  Could Google be flagging every site brought up by its engine?  That would be such an obvious piece of fear-mongering and traffic-reducing stupidity that I hesitate to impute it to them.  Any thoughts from the computer cognoscenti?

Despite my catchy title, it is your responsibility take precautions whenever you connect with anything in any way.  I am responsible for the content of this site, including in some measure the content of the comments, which is why I delete stupid and otherwise offensive comments and block those who send them.  But I take no responsibility for what goes on at the server end.

UPDATE: 9:30 AM.  Alexander Pruss informs me that the problem has been fixed.

UPDATE: 1:30 PM. Google explains the origin of the error.

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Bill Vallicella

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6 responses to “This Site Will Not Harm Your Computer!”

  1. Neil Parille Avatar
    Neil Parille

    Same happened to me. I was searching for info on the Kennedy assasination so I thought there might be a connection . . . .
    -Neil Parille

    Reply
  2. Dave Gudeman Avatar
    Dave Gudeman

    Hi, Bill, long time since I’ve been by. I’ve really enjoyed the thread on Randism, though.
    I think you probably encountered a bug on Google, and that the bug has been fixed now. I didn’t see any warnings when I googled “Google”.
    By the way, I highly recommend Noscript (http://noscript.net/) as a way of avoiding not only dangerous scripts, but also to reduce the annoyance of those horrible flashy sites designed for someone with the attention span of a hummingbird. I think you have to use the Mozilla/Firefox browser to use Noscript.

    Reply
  3. Kevin Currie Avatar
    Kevin Currie

    What I hope people realized was that the site it directed you to (if y ou clicked on any of your search results) was a “for profit” virus protection softwares site. I hope this tipped at least some of us off to the fact that it was likely a ploy whereby a business glombed onto google.
    Once I suspected this, I tried out some other search engines (msn.com, ask.com) and did not have the problem there. So, yes, it was just a problem with someone messing with google for the sake of advertisement.

    Reply
  4. Bill Vallicella Avatar
    Bill Vallicella

    Neil: It happened to everybody at every site.
    Dave: Glad you liked the Rand posts. More to come. You’re right that the bug has been fixed. Thanks for the ‘Noscript’ tip.
    Kevin: See my second update above. Google reports the problem as a human coding error.

    Reply
  5. mattghg Avatar
    mattghg

    This has made the news.

    Reply
  6. Josh Avatar
    Josh

    SkyNet is becoming self-aware.

    Reply

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