Re: [Marxism] Google was hacked!!!!

[Sean Andrews <cultstud76@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, Jan 31, 2009 at 09:28, Les Schaffer <schaffer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> whatever happened to google, it resolved itself a few minutes ago.
>
> Les
>
[fyi it wasn't a hack--well it could have been a hack, but in the
sense of, "they had some real hacks working on Google today--then the
smart guys got to work." -s]

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/this-site-may-harm-your-computer-on.html
1/31/2009 09:02:00 AM
If you did a Google search between 6:30 a.m. PST and 7:25 a.m. PST
this morning, you likely saw that the message "This site may harm your
computer" accompanied each and every search result. This was clearly
an error, and we are very sorry for the inconvenience caused to our
users.

What happened? Very simply, human error. Google flags search results
with the message "This site may harm your computer" if the site is
known to install malicious software in the background or otherwise
surreptitiously. We do this to protect our users against visiting
sites that could harm their computers. We maintain a list of such
sites through both manual and automated methods. We work with a
non-profit called StopBadware.org to come up with criteria for
maintaining this list, and to provide simple processes for webmasters
to remove their site from the list.

We periodically update that list and released one such update to 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.

Thanks to our team for their quick work in finding this. And again,
our apologies to any of you who were inconvenienced this morning, and
to site owners whose pages were incorrectly labelled. We will
carefully investigate this incident and put more robust file checks in
place to prevent it from happening again.

Thanks for your understanding.

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