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Google Hates BigGovernment

DOT COM That is.

By: Aaron Gardner (Diary)  |  December 29th, 2009 at 01:00 PM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

Earlier today while checking up on teh twitter, I saw this tweet from Caleb Howe at 10:49 am Eastern:

Naturally I clicked the link to see just what Caleb was sharing. Upon doing so, in my Chrome browser, I was met with this:

[Click image for larger view]

Why would Google be marking BigGovernment.com as a page that has malware on it? I have never before received this warning from Google when going to BigGovernment. I suppose it is possible that BigGovernment did have malicious code on it. Of course, I would then also have to believe that in the following two hours BigGovernment isolated the malicious code and removed the code. Why? Well, how else would Google Chrome now be allowing you to go to BigGovernment.com without a warning? Is their product malfunctioning? Also, Safari uses the same system as Chrome for detecting malicious sites, why didn’t Safari give the same warning when I attempted to use it?

I think the the real reason is that Google didn’t like the bad publicity BigGovernment was putting out on their internet.

See, the article that was being flagged by Google Chrome was about Net Neutrality and the duplicitous stance that Google has taken as a proponent of the same. I assume this was the offending text that caused Chrome to flag this article as malware:

Last week, in a post on the official Google blog, the company’s senior vice president for product management, Jonathan Rosenberg, wrote that while Google’s “goal is to keep the Internet open,” it opposes the concept of “openness” where it would apply to its own search and ad products.

Ironically, the rationale behind Google’s opposition to “open internet” policy of this sort sounds remarkably similar to the rationale expressed by ISPs—which Google and other “open internet” advocates have targeted as the enemy in the current fight regarding FCC rules—for opposing net neutrality. According to Rosenberg, opening up Google’s code “would actually hurt users” and result in “reduced quality” for those who rely on the service in question.

That is an end result that net neutrality opponents say could equally well be assured by instituting that specific policy, though they allege that a key difference is that net-only neutrality would help, not hurt, Google, from a financial perspective. Broader openness, by contrast, would strike a major blow to Google—and open internet advocates and major voices in the tech sphere are now calling the company out for dressing up a public policy stance that appears to driven by a pure profit motive as philosophically principled and heartfelt.[Emphasis Added]

OUCH!

Now, I am not well versed on Net Neutrality. I have read the diaries produced by Neil here on RedState and some other blogs on the subject though, and I believe I know enough to see the hypocrisy and pettiness shown by Google in this debate.

All that said, I really think that this is a shame. I love the products that Google has produced, I use them everyday, but if they are making their products bias against dissent from their political beliefs that practice will soon end.

Aaron B. Gardner

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COMMENTS

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  • stixxxnstones

    And it’s great. Seriously, it’s just as fast, and I’ve been getting noticeably better (more accurate) results. Especially when I search for stuff about Janet Napolitano :P

  • http://www.veronicaestrada.com/ Veronica Estrada
  • Duke

    is Google ‘too big to fail?’

    Just this past week, in response to some of the things I’ve been reading about the politics of Google, I changed search engines all over to Bing.com and deleted the somewhat intrusive Google toolbar.

    I hope they’ll continue to allow me to use their internet.

  • BlueFalcon

    Including my favorite comic book website, which I can tell you is certainly no bastion of conservative activism. All of it is related to this statsistats.com, whatever that is.

  • oblio

    I tried to go to statsistats vis FF and got block due to my security settings, clicked on ‘Why was this site blocked’ button and was given a Google advisory page.

  • BlueFalcon

    …it appears that sites that use Twitter for posting entries are sometimes having their links redirected through statsistats.com, which is a malware site. At least, that’s my understanding of it. BigGovernment is not the only one hit, and I can verify that Firefox also displays these warnings.

  • Praying

    I refuse to use Google anymore

  • Tom_Holsinger

    Yesterday both Big Government and Breitbart set off alerts about malware by my Trend Micro Internet Security anti-virus program.

  • Aaron Gardner

    and I visit BigGorvernment daily, multiple times in fact. I use Norton Internet Security, and it didn’t show any malware either.

  • BlueFalcon

    Biggovernment never hosted any malware to detect. Rather, some entries redirected through a malware site. Unless your AV product tests for “dirty” href’s, it won’t flag it. There may be an option in Norton to enable it, but I doubt it since Norton is notoriously terrible (made the switch to Kaspersky two years ago).

  • bk

    that caused me to hear Sheila Jackson Lee say something about “brehaveral” tendencies here?

  • Aaron Gardner

    And as far as Norton being notoriously terrible, well, I have never had a virus. Ever.

    Of course I surf pretty safely.

  • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens
  • Mayhem

    I have completely converted over to Bing. Plus, they actually acknowledge all the patriotic and religious holidays, unlike Google.

  • RedBeard
  • momac

    Does Google really say anything bad about BigGovernment at all on that page? You posted the screenshot, you should read it. The warning refers to statistats.com, which is shown within biggovernment.com.

    This is embarrassing. We just had that huge article about heightening the discourse yesterday, and today we get this technically illiterate persecution fantasy, with a bonus completely assumed motive by Google, which WILL be a source of more scorn and ridicule for our side. Rightly so, for it being on the front page. All based on imagined coincidental timing, a decision not to read the warning, and myopic browsing tendencies. This warning is neither new, nor restricted to BigGovernment.

    You can learn what the warning ACTUALLY means, by reading this: http://safebrowsing.clients.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=http://statsistats.com/&client=googlechrome&hl=en-US

    The warning occurs on numerous other sites, BigGovernment is only one of them.. Not the first, not the last, not unique, and not idealogically based.

    “Why would Google be marking BigGovernment.com as a page that has malware on it?” Because the underlying ad-serving domain, statsistats.com, HAS HAD malware on it.

    Good grief.

  • BlueFalcon

    But when I installed Kaspersky, it dug up 4 pieces of malware I had no clue were on my system. This is even after a strict no-IE, no unsafe browsing policy I bragged to my friends about. As it turns out, one of my roommates had an infected PC that exploited holes in my Windows firewall to infect me, and neither Norton nor McAffee ever caught it. Since then I’ve sworn them off.

  • momac

    Laziness. Go to surfthechannel.com, or any of the other totally unrelated sites Google lists in the warning page. They have the same warning. 30 seconds and you could have saved yourself, this site, and this entire movement some embarrassment. 30 seconds.

    How long did it take to write this, post screenshots, respond to comments, etc? Was it easier to assume than to read the details? This is nuts.

  • Aaron Gardner

    NIS is not just anti-virus.

  • Aaron Gardner

    Or do you want to pick at me about the delivery method I used to share it?

    This is a political blog, not a tech blog.

    Think about that for a moment.

  • Aaron Gardner

    Open and shut. Well done.

    /sarc

  • JadedByPolitics

    to where I had to shut it down so perhaps that is malware I don’t know but it was a pain in the you know what! BTW I use bing too SCREW google!

  • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

    Why else would you be flailing like a maniac right now? Why be so defensive if there’s no story here?

    This is clearly just another in a clear line of biased attacks on right wingers by Google. They make our stuff mysteriously unavailable on youtube, calling it spam. They deactivate our blogs on Blogger, calling it spam. And now they make our whole websites hard to access in Chrome.

    Google is on a jihad against the right.

  • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

    It doesn’t say that “receiving content from statistats.com may harm your computer,” it says “VISITING THIS WEBSITE may harm your computer.”

    Now apologize to Aaron for lashing out at him in error.

  • momac

    @Neil Both of my posts were up prior to any response to them, so I’m not sure at all what you mean by defensive. Besides which I think net neutrality is purest idiocy.

    But if the point of the article is Google’s net neutrality stance, just make it about that. Make the points that can be legitimately made about it. Don’t make it about something that affects a number of other sites totally unrelated to BigGovernment. The headline is going to be what people see, not the underlying philosophical argument.

    Which I AGREE WITH, by the way, I am just embarrassed that this is how the argument gets made. I don’t think, based on the comments, that the net neutrality in general is what is being discussed. I don’t think the headline will portray that that is your real point.

    As a side note, corporations are amoral at best, whatever they might claim.. So I would expect nothing else from Google than to preserve their business, and to extract unfair advantage through legislation if possible. I totally, completely disagree with their stance. I think, as Glenn Reynolds put it, that the people who want to change a system that works should have a heavy burden of proof that their way will be better.

  • momac

    I have no evidence that statsistats ever actually hosted malware. I should have said “Because the underlying ad-serving domain, statsistats.com, was reported to have had malware on it.” Less caps, more accuracy. My bad.

    HOWEVER

    I don’t really feel like I need to defend myself here. Your entire article’s proof is timing and distrust of Google. I think you’re the one with a heavier burden of proof, and I think you fail to make it. You are choosing to trust that a no-name website, hosted on Russian servers, was not the source of the alert as Google claimed, but that Google’s jihad for net neutrality caused them to warn against BigGovernment.com, and that they were willing to do the same to a bunch of other popular sites to get at them. I think that’s a ridiculous stance to take, with no real proof at all.

    What has surfthechannel.com done to merit action in this net neutrality push? Do you understand my point here? Maybe I’m way off, but I don’t think this has anything to do with net neutrality.

    Which, again, for the record, I am completely against.

  • Aaron Gardner
  • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

    Door’s over there if you don’t like to face the truth about Google.

  • momac

    And I suppose I can apologize for my tone, but I don’t think I’m lashing out.

    But if part of a page on biggovernment.com is serving ads or stats tracking or cookies or whatever from statsistats.com, then just by visiting biggovernment.com you are receiving content from statsistats.com. So I don’t think that language means anything different than that.

    I think the message is clear and accurate, and frankly I choose to believe the message rather than trust statsistats.com and chalk it up to a wide-ranging war for net-neutrality, with major pre-collateral damage on unrelated sites in the runup to the final attack on biggovernment.com. Somehow Google geared up for it, knew they’d be running an anti-net neutrality story and showing ocntent from statsistats, so Google got that going ahead of time to give them plausible deniability? I think that, as a position to believe, is insane.

    Those warnings, with that domain (statsistats.com), have been going on for weeks. At other sites. The anti-Google article went up in the last day. So how did Google know ahead of time what BG was going to be writing about? Or are BG unjustly accused of displaying content from statsistats.com? I’m getting more and more curious what the actual belief in the order of events was hear, because it makes zero sense.

  • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

    The fact that they’ve also blocked other sites does not prove they don’t have a systemic bias in what they do block otherwise.

  • momac

    But there’s no reason not to make honest arguments about their stances. I’m not embarrassed in the least. I just choose not to believe that Google can see into the future and prepare a cunning trap for an upcoming anti-Google BG article.

    I suppose that ability is found somewhere in the same universe where I can be defensive _before_ I get a reply.

  • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

    And I’ve still yet to see proof that broader claim is even true.

    Because Google is secretive like that.

  • Aaron Gardner

    And I never will because they won’t open up their code or practices like they want the rest of the Net to do.

    That is the point. You just don’t get it.

    It is possible that statsistats.com was never even on BigGovernment. I don’t know, can you prove that it was? No you can’t. Only Google knows why BigGovernment got flagged today. And that’s how they intend to keep it.

    As a side note, I looked up statsistats.com before I published this and apparently this “malware” that google claims to have found when crawling the web is fake. In other words, google flagged BigGovernment for having fake malicious code on it.

  • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

    If you’re saying we’re dishonest here at RS, you really should prove it, retract and apologize, or leave.

  • BlueFalcon

    I falsely believed I didn’t need expensive software firewalls at the time because I had a rock-solid hardware firewall protecting my network. For everything else, there was Windows Firewall. What I didn’t know is that roommates on LimeWire behind the same router can render that completely moot, since Windows seemed perfectly happy to let ICMP packets through by default. Needless to say, I keep commercial software firewalls up on all of my home PC’s now and rigorously examine their settings.

    But, I thought my system was perfect because my weekly deep scans showed no viruses.

  • Aaron Gardner

    I have the full suite. I don’t mess around.

  • momac

    I don’t remember all the sites that have the warning. I haven’t been preparing for this argument for the past two weeks. But it was not the only one.

    What’s funny is how the insane claims in the original post apparently require no proof, but any disagreement does.

    Original Post requires you to believe
    - Google hates BG.com
    - Google somehow knows BG article is forthcoming weeks ahead
    - Uses statsistats as stooge for weeks to prepare battlefield against BG
    - Warns visitors away from other sites in order to provide plausible deniability
    All of this requires no proof other than Google’s net neutrality stance (which i disagree with)

    Disagreement requires you to believe
    - statsistats might have actually had malware
    - BG was caught up in this for the same reason as a number of other sites
    This requires proof

    Once again, for Google to have done this deliberately, they would have had to have precognitive abilities or have been tipped off for weeks in advance. I think that’s a stance that requires serious proof. And I guess we’ll have ot just agree to disagree on where the burden lies here. My opinion is that the original claims in the article are pretty far out there.

  • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

    I’d quote that line from some Adam Sandler movie but I dont’ like Adam Sandler movies and so never saw it.

  • Common_Cents
  • momac

    Here’s the entire thing, try and find your quote that proves I was ‘lying’. What a joke.

    Here’s your quote:

  • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

    But I’m not seeing it.

    It’s almost like you’re just playing stupid in order to give us some laughs.

    Fess up, is that you, Leon?

  • momac

    I said “there

  • Aaron Gardner

    Sometimes a writer will use events that happened which are coincidental with another event as the lead in to the meat of the story.

    Sometimes they will use flare in their title, it’s called a “hook”.

    Other than that, all I did was ask reasonable questions.

    As far as the strawman conspiracy angle that you have latched onto…well, you assume many things that have to be true which really don’t.

    1. “Google hate BG.com”

    This was a title, a “hook”.

    2. “Google somehow knows BG article is forthcoming weeks ahead”

    Why assume that they needed foreknowledge of the article? Doesn’t Google crawl the actively crawl the internet?

    3. “Uses statsistats as stooge for weeks to prepare battlefield against BG”

    Why assume it was set up for BG.com. It is entirely plausible that the use of statsistats was just a matter opportunity and timing.

    4. “Warns visitors away from other sites in order to provide plausible deniability
    All of this requires no proof other than Google

  • Aaron Gardner

    Try again.

    And yes, you implied I was dishonest. I would like you to either prove, or retract and apologize.

  • Aaron Gardner
  • momac

    “It is possible that statsistats.com was never even on BigGovernment. I don

  • Aaron Gardner
  • momac

    Nobody’s dishonest, the adjective ‘dishonest’ was never used, and the adjective ‘honest’ referred to the noun ‘arguments’. The sentence didn’t mention you, it spoke in generalities about how I’d like the argument to be made against net neutrality in general.

    I don’t believe your arguments, and I don’t believe you’re that thin-skinned to think that requires a retraction as some matter of honor. And what’s worse is we probably agree on the actual philosophical issue wholeheartedly.

    So now this is really my last bit on this subject, because it’s making it all worse to argue about these things. I agree with you on net neutrality, I disagree that the warning from Google was likely payback for their article.

  • Aaron Gardner

    You called my post an embarrassment, and you implied that I was dishonest in my argumentation. Those are facts. I didn’t search you out and ask you to comment here, you chose to. If you want to be seen as the guy calling me a liar, so be it.

  • penguin2

    the poster was making a dishonest one, so it is not a question of semantics, but your view of Aaron and RS. Also, I’ll include the link to this comment by you, some serious implication on your part. Others are reading….

    http://www.redstate.com/aarongardner/2009/12/29/google-hates-biggovernment/#comment-565

  • Finrod

    Even though it was expressed probably too harshly. After reading through everything posted, I’m thinking that it’s highly coincidental that Google flagged a page on biggovernment.com that criticized Google. Google could have just as easily flagged redstate.com in the same way if you happened to pull up a page here that had one of those malware ads that Erick mentioned in a frontpage post and Chrome noticed the malware. I’ve even gotten malware ads at foxnews.com before, but thankfully since I don’t use Windows, it didn’t do anything more than redirect my browser off to some bogus site.

    There are enough valid reasons to criticize Google without flogging them for detecting third-party malware.

  • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

    Finrod, you’re asking us to give Google the benefit of the doubt. Why should we? Why do you?

    Why do you work from the assumption that they are innocent, when they’re known to have an overt political bias (the corporation itself giving five figures against Prop. 8, for example).

  • Richard Mullins

    but that might be due to my anti-virus software(AVG). I would get a screenshot of it but it might not be reflective of all things that google is doing.

  • http://dezignworx-ae.com tsquare

    I’m going to NOT upgrade to a Droid phone next month.

    I’ll stick with the Blackberry

  • oblio

    Google (a known liberal operative) attacks a conservative site by placing malware on it through a third party. Damage done with no culpability. We are in a war and spies and saboteurs are everywhere.

  • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

    I think that’s the most likely scenario: Unknown lefties attack sites through their ads, then turn around and use Google’s complaint systems to try to shut us down.

    That’s the MO in Blogger and Youtube. Google allows it to happen because they approve, but they claim ‘algorithms’ are involved.

    When it’s all human intervention.

  • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

    But I’d no more use them than I’d watch CNN. I know they have an agenda, and it’s against me.

  • SteveLA

    Neil,

    Have you ever seen surveys from the Technology Industry on which way a majority of folks lean? I’d guess that by a very large margin Technology folks lean Left to Libertarian. I work in a subset of that industry, Defense, so most programmer/technology types I run into tend to lean Right.

    You might be tilting at something that by the nature of the work force you are always going to be on the opposite side on most issues.

    I’ve got no data to back the above supposition on, just wondered what your experience in the Tech Industry has been.

  • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

    I suspect if you adjust for demographics there’s no change. This industry is just loaded with a lot of 20-something arrogant morons and overeducated idiots.

  • SteveLA

    Neil

    Reading the usual crud and story comments on the Internet; Slash Dot and others, I get the sense that a large percentage of the Tech population is as you describe,

    So your point that “they are out to get you”, probably has some traction, but it is the nature of the beast and those who build it, which is not going to be changing anytime soon.

  • oblio

    hidden amongst the chaff are conservatives.

    Hint: Look for Assembly language programmers, most young (and liberal) whippersnappers never heard of it, let alone know how to use it.

    I suspect that the moron mainstream comes from programming being part engineering (conservative) and part art (liberal). Pretty much any idiot can program but the more vertical jobs require in depth engineering knowledge to make the bits fly.

  • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

    Been a while since I did any though: I wrote a little music player in 6502 assembly for the NES.

  • penguin2

    Not sure if that is quite the term, but sounds good.

    http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/days-end-round-up/73853-days-end-roundup

  • oblio

    My current job is programming Z8 and Z8000 to control one of our ECM jamming pods. Some time ago I programmed the HCM-231 (Hughes Computing Machine bit/slice processor), otherwise known as the Radar Data Processor for the F-15 A/B/C/D.

  • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens
  • Richard Mullins

    Yes, my dad’s older brother was a programmer(I mean was because his any more) and has done some work Motorola’s 8 bit processors in Gas pumps when he worked for a company called AutoGas. Most of his programming stuff goes over my head but then again sometimes what dad told me in the stuff he when he still work as Medical Technologist. Oh well, that’s life. If you start talking about Airplanes I’ll really understand.

  • Finrod

    I’m not one to give Google any benefit of the doubt, but there are known issues with third-party sites being able to sneak malware in via ads, like I mentioned. To believe Aaron’s scenario, I have to believe that Google was aware of the biggovernment.com post and someone deliberately hacked their malware-detection code to flag it– which since it’s not repeatable, means that it would have to be random whether it blocks it or not, which would defeat their purpose of trying to shut down access to the site; or I can believe that biggovernment.com just like redstate.com has had issues with malware in ads, and Google’s malware detection picked up on that and flagged it for that purpose. One requires actual malice and effort and would be a crappy way to actually block anything, plus it would require them burying something in Chrome that they can activate remotely; the other is a natural outgrowth of automated malware detection. To me, Occam’s Razor points to the latter. I would think that if Google wanted something blocked, it would be blocked all the time and not 1 time in 20 or whatever the low percentage is.

    There have been plenty of hostile articles written about Google out there on the Internet. If you can show me any kind of pattern of them being blocked by Google, then sure, I’ll believe that Google is putting in effort to block them. But a one-time occurrence like this? That’s much more likely to be a random coincidence, especially when other seemingly-innocent non-political sites are also ending up mysteriously blocked. I need more evidence than has been provided here before I can accept the “Google is maliciously blocking sites they don’t like” hypothesis. Do not ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity, after all.

  • Aaron Gardner

    I ask because I think you missed it, as did momac.

    The whole point of this diary was Google’s duplicitous stance on Net Neutrality and the irony of that story being blocked by Google. The fact that we can only guess at why BG.com was blocked leads directly into the theme of the linked article at BG.com.

    The irony is that if Google applied the rules it wants dictated on ISP’s, I could know beyond a shadow of a doubt why BG.com was blocked.

  • Richard Mullins

    on my system but then again, I’m using an router/DSL modem(2Wire). I don’t doubt you but I’m not seeing the block or the malware. As for the Anti-virus I run is AVG 9.0 Free on Vista Ultimate 64. Maybe Google wants to play nice with AT&T, I don’t know.

  • Aaron Gardner

    But, it is not blocked for me anymore either. It was only doing that for a short time.

    And let me say again, the blocking isn’t the real issue here. The issue is that Google will not open up their code, while they actively pursue legislation to force their competitors to do so.

  • Richard Mullins

    and from time to time, I can gets some weird Trojan Horse stuff pop up after I use their website. Of course, it could be someone doesn’t like AVG. Anyways, Google has seemed to be a little hypocrisy over the years and not opening the code but then asking others to do what they won’t do. If you don’t want to open it up, stop advocating others to do so. At Microsoft isn’t being hypocritical when it doesn’t release there code because they aren’t asking others to open it up. Most people don’t like a Do as I say, Not as I do kind of attitude.

  • Finrod

    You spend the first two-thirds of the post talking about how Google has blocked biggovernment.com, then at the end you tie it into the whole net neutrality debate.

    Either you think that Google deliberately blocked biggovernment.com, or you don’t. If you do, then my comments are completely relevant. If you don’t, then IMHO you’ve written a bad article, because you’re implying things that you don’t believe in an effort to discredit Google through something that isn’t a result of malicious action on their part.

    You don’t need Google to open their code to find out if they’re doing something malicious; just look at the situation with Windows and DR DOS back in 1991– people were able to figure out with some digging that Microsoft was deliberately putting up a bogus error message in order to discredit DR DOS, without Microsoft ever opening their code. The handwaving you’re doing in your article only weakens the more general case against Google and net neutrality by introducing an irrelevant (though mildly amusing) distraction. If you’d written a paragraph or two about the blocking of biggovernment.com and made that the hook into a more substantial article about Google and net neutrality in general, that would be fine– but you didn’t; the proportions are the other way around.

    That’s why I disapprove of your article and would disrecommend it if I could.

  • GregInFla

    Life is good…

  • http://whereswalden.com/ Jeff Walden

    Sorry, but that narrative never really held water except from the “curious coincidence” point of view. Chrome is the largest and clearest strike against the theory, but there are others, if you have the time and patience to look for them (which you might not, I can think of many things that are more fun and worthwhile to do :-) ).

    (Disclaimer: I work for Mozilla.)

  • jdkchem

    What most likely happened, and it is not the first time, is that enough libturd morons flood google with phishing/scam/attack site claims and google automagically blocked access. Somebody then comes along and emails google a wtf and a human looks at the site and calls bs and removes the block.
    The panty-waste libturds have been doing this for more than a year now. They did the same crap to the American Spectator website in October of 2008.

  • http://whereswalden.com/ Jeff Walden

    Why is Google tied to Firefox? Simply put, they have the infrastructure to keep on top of malicious sites as they appear (the expected lifetime for the average phish is only a few hours, so this isn’t something you can just wish out of nothing), they publish the list using a protocol anyone can use, and the quality of the lists is sufficiently high that there isn’t reason to search for a provider that would give better results for sufficiently little extra cost. Chrome obviously would use it. Safari does as well for reasons similar to those of Mozilla (or so I assume). As far as I know, only Internet Explorer and Opera don’t use Google. IE doesn’t for obvious reasons (Microsoft is incredibly paranoid about relying on any third parties, so if they want something, they do it themselves or hire people to make it for them); I don’t know why Opera doesn’t, maybe they couldn’t negotiate something or got what they thought was a better deal elsewhere. (This sort of bad-site detection is at this point a required feature for any web browser that desires to be competitive in the marketplace, so foregoing offering the feature is not an option.)

    You should get the same results from all three browsers — eventually. Since the bad-site lists are updated only periodically (I think maybe every half an hour or so, and that duration may vary between browsers or even browser versions), results in one browser may temporarily be more accurate than in another browser, but in a few hours they would even out.

    Incidentally, if you want to disable this checking, open up Options from the Tools Menu (Preferences from the Firefox menu on Mac, Preferences from the Edit menu on Linux), select the Security panel, and uncheck the Block reported attack sites and Block reported web forgeries checkboxes.

    Although it sounds like in this case, once we get past the initial knee-jerk reaction, there actually may have been a problem here that was merely coincidental with the Big Government post. It doesn’t appear blocked now, so the problem was fixed. Incidentally, Google’s had missteps before on this; for a period of a couple hours their blocklist once included example.com, a domain whose sole purpose is to be a placeholder domain for Internet documentation (as the site itself points out if you try to load it, with reference to an IETF RFC!) and which is in no way a malicious site. However, it generally works quite well.

  • Tom_Holsinger

    My Trend Micro anti-virus software identified the specific malware at Big Government, and it was the same malware it identified at Breitbart earlier in the day. I got to Breitbart by clicking on my bookmark of it. I got to Big Government by clicking on a link to a story there from another site. I don’t recall the site linking to the BG sttory – it might have been Lucianne.

    I.e., it is highly likely that there was some malware at both sites, and the Google report about BG having malware was most likely correct at the time the report was written.

  • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

    And google won’t lift a finger to fix the system. Which is why all the anti-Bush googlebombs stayed in effect, as well.

  • OccamsRazor

    It’s been way more than a year. I lurked at the Greek blog for years before coming here (and lurking) and it was their MO to periodically instruct/remind newcomers to create those style of internet intrusions, such as overwhelming wikipedia. I’m not disagreeing with you, I’m merely trying to put into perspective what we’re up against.

  • merryj1

    Until a day or two following the “Big Sister is Watching” article on RedState, I was picking up tracking cookies on every visit to the site. I do understand that tracking cookies are a completely different breed of cat than malware, and these are described as “low threat level” by Norton Internet Security (which removes them with no problem). But perhaps due to some glitch in my own system, they do cause my computer to “freeze” and/or “hang,” which is why I started checking for the source(s) by cleaning my system, visiting ONLY a “suspect” site, then again running a full system scan.

    The same or similar tracking cookies are/were also latching onto me at Big Gov. Now, I recently did a writing assignment on Behavioral Tracking (for a health communication pub), so I have decent familiarity with the tactic for advertising; and it is possible (but not necessarily probable) that these are of that type. If so, they don’t collect personal data; they tabulate types of sites visited for ad “targeting” so that, for example, if my computer surfs fashion sites, I’d likely get pop-up ads for chic clothing items, etc. But if these are from “Big Sis” on the other hand, my name has probably been run through FOID records or something.

  • Patrick_Ruffini

    I have nothing to add beyond what Momac said above, but feel compelled to state that it doesn’t do RedState or any other conservative site any credit to front conspiracy theories that pay little heed to how the Internet and anti-spam systems actually work.

    Full disclosure: I do consulting work for Google (opinions here my own), and have seen enough speculation about political motivation being behind things you may not like to merit a response.

    As to my own experience with this, earlier yesterday I visited Tweetmeme and got the EXACT SAME Statsistats error flag in Chrome, suggesting this is a widespread issue with those embedding that bit of third party code on their sites. To cling to the belief that BigGovernment was somehow singled out is a pretty big leap.

    Moreover, a few weeks ago, I tweeted a security error — retweeted by one of the contributors here — that appeared on the DNC’s contribution page that was flagged in Chrome and in no other browser.

    http://twitter.com/presjpolk/status/6489656762
    re: http://www.twitpic.com/sprqk

    So, did we all suddenly leap to the conclusion that Google was out to get Obama and the DNC by depriving them of thousands of dollars in contributions, or was it simply a screwup by the DNC staff? Occam’s Razor.

    Not long ago, a post was also frontpaged here claiming Google was suppressing the climategate scandal in the suggestions that appear when you type in the main search box. This was also debunked by a commenter pretty quickly (http://www.redstate.com/neil_stevens/2009/12/03/google-fraud/#comment-3977), and “climategate” was clearly visible as soon as you typed “cl” — though it was intermittent for a few days. The evidence for this claim? “Climategate” happened to be a Google Hot Trend — which begs the question why a particularly determined employee would have suppressed it in the search box but not in a list of trends highlighted by Google itself! Again, Occam’s Razor.

    Incidentally, Google also responded to this in its Search help forum, explaining why emerging trends on breaking news issues (often with political implications) appear intermittently in the suggest box:

    http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Web+Search/thread?hl=en&tid=25112ee0c29cbd01

    That forum, and others (http://www.google.com/support/?hl=en) are actually a pretty good place to get a response to your questions and concerns. Or, you can feel free to e-mail me directly (patrick dot ruffini – at – that google email service dot com) to flag it, or find me on Twitter (@PatrickRuffini).

  • Aaron Gardner

    First, tell me where I said Google singled out BigGovernment?

    Second, tell me how the google phishing filter works. Maybe if Google opened up their practices to the public as they wish others to do, by force of government, I would have to speculate at all as to why BG.com got hit by this.

    Third, are you saying that having a bad certificate and having google recognize that is that same as the error that caused sites with the tweetmeme applet embedded to be flagged as phishing?

    Fourth, what of the reports that statsistats.com doesn’t actually host any malware of any kind? Is google’s product really that bad that you can’t even trust the software to do it’s job?

    Lastly, what is your opinion on Google’s duplicitous stance wrt Net Neutrality?

    After all, that was the entire purpose of writing this.

  • Patrick Ruffini

    “First, tell me where I said Google singled out BigGovernment?”

    Possibly when you said that “I think the the real reason is that Google didn

  • Aaron Gardner

    That’s all I needed to know really. You didn’t like my delivery method so you didn’t read what I linked to. Since you didn’t do that you don’t see the irony in the story I told. That’s cool.

  • JadedByPolitics

    WE Conservatives have watched with disgust at some of the issues that have arisen over at google and a contributor here QUESTIONS something that seems out of place and THIS DIARY out of the THOUSANDS of diaries on this site brings you out to speak? Does google PAY YOU?

  • Aaron Gardner

    But he is just expressing his opinions on this, so that shouldn’t matter.

  • JadedByPolitics

    I was just being snarky but he does get paid by google that is too much because too me Aaron it does matter due to the fact that in 4 years time Patrick Ruffini has NOT found ANYTHING of interest on this site to add to? NEVER? REALLY? come on!

  • Patrick Ruffini

    I particularly feel the need to defend my allegiance to the site or my friendship to its proprietors to you, save to say that I was among the first wave of front pagers here in 2005 and my activity log prior to the WordPress switch was wiped out.

  • Patrick Ruffini

    I *don’t* particularly feel the need… Getting late.

  • Patrick Ruffini

    This piece discusses the origins of the Tweetmeme attack, and why so many sites were spammed, and could have been related to ad server issue Erick blogged about earlier.

    http://msmvps.com/blogs/spywaresucks/archive/2009/12/29/1748041.aspx

  • Aaron Gardner

    So tweetmeme.com uses Openx which needs a patch in order to stop ads from being exploited. That makes total sense. But then, this part does create another question:

    I cannot say that an openx vulnerability is definitely the cause of the problem that Wayne saw at tweetmeme, but it seems to be a likely candidate. The only ads that I am seeing at tweetmeme at this point in time are Google/Doubleclick advertisements. Google/Doubleclick are, more often than not, clean (although they have had problems in the past). I am not seeing any evidence of content being hosted on suspicious domains.

    If only Google ads were on tweetmeme.com, does that mean that Google ads were the culprit that caused these multiple sites to end up being blocked by Google software?

  • JadedByPolitics

    I am not asking you nor do I expect you to explain yourself however it is interesting STILL that you just now found something to discuss and you get paid by google….think about it.

  • ericathunderpaws

    There have been a series of articles on RedState about Google shenanigans, which is why I’m asking for advice. If you don’t want to post my comments here, I hope you will consider emailing me a private reply.

    I have a Blogspot website: http://jeffersonsrebels.blogspot.com. My website is conservative, so I focus a lot on Obama. When I search for my articles and graphic illustrations on Google, everything shows up in my results list, whether text or image, WITH THE EXCEPTION of one series of three graphics. When I search for those graphics, my keywords exactly match the images, but still they never appear in the results. They should appear at the top. The only way to get to the images is to follow a text link to the site. You can view the images here: (http://jeffersonsrebels.blogspot.com/2009/11/quo-warranto-to-remove-obama.html). If you do a test image search, you won’t find them.

    All my other graphics regarding Obama appear on the search results page.

    Is my imagination running away with me? This is beginning to seem suspicious. Is it possible that someone at Google has singled out these images for censorship in their search engine? If so, how do they do it? And if they do, is there anything I can do about it?

    I fully understand that you may not approve of the ideas behind my graphics, but I sense that you certainly disapprove of censorship.

    Can you advise me?