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.
Same happened to me. I was searching for info on the Kennedy assasination so I thought there might be a connection . . . .
-Neil Parille
Posted by: Neil Parille | Saturday, January 31, 2009 at 07:47 AM
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.
Posted by: Dave Gudeman | Saturday, January 31, 2009 at 11:24 AM
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.
Posted by: Kevin Currie | Saturday, January 31, 2009 at 12:28 PM
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.
Posted by: Bill Vallicella | Saturday, January 31, 2009 at 12:44 PM
This has made the news.
Posted by: mattghg | Saturday, January 31, 2009 at 05:21 PM
SkyNet is becoming self-aware.
Posted by: Josh | Saturday, January 31, 2009 at 10:37 PM