What more do I need to say, every system will produce false positives 
but some produce less embarrassing.
Caught on the 27th December when viewing a feedburner feed in Google Reader that appeared in the “Top Recommendations” boxes
Legal bit – yes I know Google hasn’t spread the malware, the feedburner feed probably contained an image which in turn was on a domain which was on a shared host using the IP 220.196.59.23 which in turned had some malware on one or more domains on the host but still it was Google that said google.co.uk would harm my computer not me!
Update: My friend David Harry (who has just done one of the most comprehensive Information retrieval posts ever) sent me some more amusing additional slippups including:
- http://google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=google.com
- http://google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=news.com.au
- http://google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=ebay.com
For a few more checkout How to check if a site is serving malware or um not as the case maybe.
3 comments
This is funny, not because of what you pointed to, but for your defense of a “false positive”. Google didn’t say that google.co.uk would harm your computer. Sentence is very concise. And no, I don’t love google
Perhaps you should have read the whole article
or even just the next paragraph would have done you then your comment wouldn’t be subject to a sarcky response but alas not.
The wording of the google warning has I believe been subject to debate the phrase “contains elements” is according to several arm chair lawyers misleading and while the sentence is as you say concise that doesn’t change the fact google blocked there own site and sent me as a user a warning “visiting this [google.co.uk] may harm your pc” it’s the big heading by the way if your wondering and no I put the bracketed google.co.uk in to remind you which site it had blocked