Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!

Since Sunday, people using Chrome have been getting a malware warning upon attempting to visit this blog. I'm not terribly knowledgeable about this stuff, but I was able to determine what the likely problem was: a post from nearly two years ago, with a link to another website I won't name- you'll see it in a moment. At any rate, I deleted that whole post yesterday, though it still shows up in a search. But if you were to click  on that link, as I did, you'd be told "That page does not exist."
Note that the OTI post, the first result, is not labeled as a hazard. All the others, hosted at the apparently offending site, are.

I will point out that two Chrome users have told me they were blocked from going to the page, but had no problem reading it in RSS. So there's that option.

Additionally, I did a malware scan (results here, though I don't know how long they'll be cached), and was told OTI was malware-free. I'm not sure how often Chrome updates its "dangerous sites" data base, but I'm hoping it gets cleared up. I'm a little confused... isn't Chrome a Google product? Why would Chrome mark a site (or page) dangerous, but not Google? At any rate, sorry people are having to deal with this, and I hope what I've done already is enough to get it cleared up, sooner or later.

Of course the people having the problem won't be able to read this, either.

2 comments:

Cujo359 said...

There's also Firefox. Add the NoScript and AdBlock+ extensions, and it's a pretty safe browser. FF gives you the option of visiting a site that's marked dangerous.

There's a database somewhere, maintained by someone who is apparently not Google, that keeps track of this stuff. Obviously, I don't know how often it's updated.

Lockwood said...

Funny- first thing I did using this laptop was download Firefox. 2nd was get AdBlock+ extension. That may be why I haven't seen warnings. Should look at NoScript. As I said though, no Firefox users have apparently been getting warnings.