Re:Facebook is gaslighting the web. We can fix it.
by podperson on Monday November 21, 2011 @05:28PM
(#3263111)
I can't believe I'm posting something that might be taken as defending Facebook but...
If a site appears to contain malicious content at time X but not at time Y than I would PREFER to be notified that it is a dubious site until the site has earned back trust in some way. Continuing to warn users about a site that historically contained badness seems to me to be a FEATURE.
Re:Facebook is gaslighting the web. We can fix it.
by ajross on Monday November 21, 2011 @07:08PM
(#3263404)
That's actually exactly Google's solution: they give you a set of reports and an indication of when the malware or malicious link was last detected on the site.
But I don't think that's the issue here. That facebook warning does not, as far as I know, get generated from a positive malware/spam/badness metric. It's just thrown up as a default action when someone links to an unblessed site on the web. That's what the poster doesn't like: it goes against the whole idea of hyperlinking.
Re:Facebook is gaslighting the web. We can fix it.
by benregenspan on Monday November 21, 2011 @07:28PM
(#3263459)
But as lbrandy mentioned, this is in one rare case and appears to be the result of a bug. If this happened when most links were clicked leaving Facebook, you can rest assured that all publishers would be up in arms.
Doesn't Google has this problem too, that detecting badness at the "indexing time" is not a sufficient solution? The content of a site may change between their checks. No pop-ups are shown in between indexing times nevertheless.
With your abuse reporting volume, you should be able to almost instantly detect statistically significant malicious links, and remove them from your news feeds, should the content change to malicious after "write-time".