Quick Online Tips

Google Search Marks ALL Sites with Malware Warnings

Posted: 31 Jan 2009 07:17 AM PST

If you use Google search for any search term right now, it is marking them all as “This site may harm your computer“. Basically clicking on any of these search results will lead users to a malware warning page and you cannot access the site from Google search results anymore making all links practically useless to visitors.

I observed this when trying to start the Yahoo! front page

yahoo malware

Then I realized this issue was affecting all websites on the web and Google Search had even marked all its own Google properties in search results as Malware. This was making all links going out from Google Search not reachable without warning.

google malware warning

The problem is whenever you try to visit any site marked with this warning, you are taken to a Malware warning page, which either advises you to visit the Google’s Safe Browsing diagnostic page for this site, or if you are the owner of this web site, to request a review of your site using Google’s Webmaster Tools. This is an StopBadware.org initiative to protect unsuspecting web surfers from dangerous websites and harmful malware software downloads online (incidentally StopBadware is not loading up right now).

malware warning

Something has gone wrong on the Google Search marking algorithm, as it is marking all sites as harmful and warning users that they are prone to infect their computers with viruses, trojans and worms via infected malware downloads from such web sites. But this is basically making Google search useless until the issue is fixed. Are you also noticing the same phenomenon in Google Search?

Update: More users are noticing the same issue via Twitter

google warn2

google warn3

Update: Google seems to have fixed the issue now. But it would be interesting if Google let us know why it happened and what steps they have taken to ensure that it does not happen again. The huge drop in outgoing google search result statistics would also be interesting at look at.

Update: Google has issued the official reason why it occured.

StopBadware carefully researches each consumer complaint to decide fairly whether that URL belongs on the list. Since each case needs to be individually researched, this list is maintained by humans, not algorithms. We periodically receive updates to that list and received one such update to release on the site this morning.

Unfortunately (and here’s the human error), the URL of ‘/’ was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and ‘/’ expands to all URLs. Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file. Since we push these updates in a staggered and rolling fashion, the errors began appearing between 6:27 a.m. and 6:40 a.m. and began disappearing between 7:10 and 7:25 a.m., so the duration of the problem for any particular user was approximately 40 minutes.

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Copyright 2009. Quick Online Tips. All Rights Reserved.

Yahoo! Briefcase Free Online Storage Closing Down

Posted: 31 Jan 2009 06:07 AM PST

Yahoo! Briefcase, the popular free file storage service associated with Yahoo! accounts will be closing on March 30, 2009. Yahoo! advises you must either download or delete your files by March 30, 2009, after which you will not be able to access your Yahoo! Briefcase account and your files will be deleted by default.

Its nostalgic because most old-time veteran Yahoo! email users (like me) stored their files in Yahoo! briefcase; a time when the Yahoo email account offered only few MB of email storage space. But over time Yahoo email has started offering unlimited storage space (as have most other free email services), and people now store most commonly used files as email attachments, which too have grown in size. Moreover with more free online storage services expanding into the market, Yahoo briefcase was bound to face severe competition.

The ever increasing broadband internet speeds have made online files as easily accessible and downloadable as offline files on your computer with the added advantage that they can be accessed from anywhere in the world. Now lets get downloading our files from Yahoo! briefcase before I forget…

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Get Chrome Tab Pages in Firefox with Google Toolbar

Posted: 31 Jan 2009 05:38 AM PST

The new Google Toolbar beta for Firefox promises to mimic the Google Chrome browser even more. If you liked the most visited thumbnail tabs in your Google Chrome browser, the new Google toolbar beta will give you the same look now in Firefox!

chrome-tabs

The Google new tab page automatically provides up to nine image thumbnails and links for websites that you visit on a regular basis. Click a thumbnail to open a website or right-click it to access options in order to open it in another new tab or in a new window. Thumbnails won’t be displayed until Toolbar has saved at least three thumbnails.

If it reveals too much of your browsing habits to other public users on your computer, you can disable Google new tabs. Right click the Google logo in the Google toolbar > Options > Uncheck “Enable the Google new tab page” and you are done.

You can also edit the thumbnails by clicking the Edit thumbnails link near the bottom of the page, and click the X icon over the thumbnail you want to remove. Over this add the Chrome Firefox themes and you might never miss Google Chrome again.

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Ma.gnolia Bookmarks Offline: Severe Data Loss

Posted: 31 Jan 2009 04:19 AM PST

Ma.gnolia is a popular social bookmarking tool and its now offline. The site owners say that Ma.gnolia has suffered severe data corruption and data loss and data recovery seems difficult in the next few days.

The website shows only this messsage now -

Early on the West-coast morning of Friday, January 30th, Ma.gnolia experienced every web service’s worst nightmare: data corruption and loss. For Ma.gnolia, this means that the service is offline and members’ bookmarks are unavailable, both through the website itself and the API. As I evaluate recovery options, I can’t provide a certain timeline or prognosis as to to when or to what degree Ma.gnolia or your bookmarks will return; only that this process will take days, not hours.

Though they are trying to keep the Ma.gnolia community updated on Twitter, it will not go well with users who heavily depend on it for their bookmark storage and community activities.

More and more web users are now filing their favorite sites and links in free online bookmarking services like Delicious, which lets user access their bookmarks from anywhere in the world while sharing them with friends. But we hope they will stay safe online forever…

Its surprising how frequently such popular websites are suffer data losses - remember how JournalSpace lost thousands of blogs due to a disgruntled employee and Sitemeter lost statistics data due to power outage. These events highlight that we should back up our online data, in whichever form it is, wherever it is - better be safe than sorry. It could happen to any service, anytime.

An Ignoble Experiment

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2009/01/31

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