In the last week I have received two emails with the subject "Google Password Assistance". These emails include a link I can click in order to change the password on my account. However I have never requested assistance to change my Gmail password. Read more...
Google is most people's favorite search engine. Millions use its Gmail web-based email service, and many are now using its new web browser, Chrome. Yet unlike other large corporations that dominate their sector of the IT market - Microsoft, for example - Google is more loved than hated. Its corporate motto of "don't be evil" makes Google seem like everyone's friend. But is it really? Google seems happy to carry ads for pirate software sites and purveyors of spyware and malware. That seems pretty evil to me. Read more...
In the last 24 hours we received several reports that clicking on Google adverts for "free WinRar downloads" resulted in an attempt to install malware. As the informants didn't tell us the address the ads linked to, we are unable to block them using the AdSense ad filter. I have written to Google about this, and asked our informants to do the same, because even if I could block the ads, they would still appear elsewhere. But for the time being I have had to remove Google ads from our "How to open Rar files" page, which will cost us dear, as it is the most visited page on our site. Read more...
Yesterday saw the launch of a new search engine. Cuil (pronounced "cool", and named after the Gaelic word for "knowledge") has been developed by former Google employees. It claims to have indexed more than three times the number of pages as Google, and to base its results purely on content and relevance, not link popularity. If true, it could make the entire search engine optimization (SEO) "profession" redundant. Hooray! But how well does it work in practise? Read more...
It seems that persistence pays off in the end. McAfee has finally restored our green rating. Yahoo! Read more...
One week has passed since I informed McAfee that SiteAdvisor was defaming my website by stating that it contained dangerous downloads when the virus it claimed to have found was in fact a false positive. And nothing has happened. Read more...
Web safety tools like McAfee SiteAdvisor and Yahoo! SearchScan create a false sense of security. Quite apart from wrongly accusing safe websites like mine as being harmful, they encourage users to believe that sites marked as safe are safe. But that is simply not the case, because there are many bad sites that don't get a bad rating at all. Read more...
When does the cure become worse than the sickness? Webmasters don't just run the risk of having their sites labelled "harmful" by badly designed spyware scanners. They are also having their website visitor statistics skewed in the name of web safety. In February, Czech anti-virus developer Grisoft added a component called LinkScanner to its product AVG. This pre-scans every link on a page of search results so as to inform the user whether the site contains malware. And webmasters are furious about it. Read more...
