The external people treating these lists as absolute truths and automatically taking domains down are the ones at fault here. Google didn't grab power, Radix gave it to them without asking.
What Radix does has no impact on Google, and I don't see how Google would be incentivized to pressure Radix. So I don't see how to make the leap blaming Google for Radix's incompetence. Yes, Google should recognize the risk of this happening, but they'd have to balance that against the rewards (or at least what they consider rewards)
I had my main family domain put on Google's safe browsing block list and it has a massive impact. No one can visit the site. I think apps using system browser runtimes (ie: mobile) may stop working. I've seen reports that it can impact email deliver-ability. And, now, we see that it can get your domain put on serverHold so the problem becomes impossible to rectify.
Google should have to pay for the damage. In my case, it was about 4h of work to figure out what was going on and how to fix it, so not much, but I've seen small businesses that rely on their primary domain to drive most of their sales via web and email. In those cases, having your domain placed on server hold because of Google's false statements can have a serious, detrimental financial effect.
But my point is that any knock on effects like domain suspension, email deliver-ability, etc. stem from 3rd parties misusing the safe browsing list outside the scope of safe browsing.
I don't see how Google can be blamed for other companies erroneously treating the safe browsing list as a source of truth for generally malicious domains
That's fair and I agree. My opinion is that both should be liable in a case like this. If I had to attribute it, my starting point would be that Google is liable for the loss of website traffic and the registry is liable for the loss of email and all other lost services due to the domain suspension.
It spirals though because, like you pointed out, no one forced (ex:) Mozilla or Apple to adopt the blacklist. They did that voluntarily, so they should be responsible for their share. That's why nothing ever gets fixed. It's broken, but there's so much potential for finger pointing that no one gets pinned down and held responsible.
The answer is always the same IMO. Break up big tech companies into a million little pieces.
I totally agree, but if I went after every company I felt to be incompetent to the point of criminal negligence I'd be up to my eyeballs in lawsuits just over password requirements.
> The answer is always the same IMO. Break up big tech companies into a million little pieces.
Generally I agree, but in this case I think there's an even simpler solution: 1) hold Google accountable for entries in their safe browsing lists (as an adjacent poster pointed out, the legal precedent may be there) and 2) make companies legally liable for misusing 3rd party data.
Really just the second part would suffice, and frankly it's purely good for society. The inevitable outcome is that no one exposes data they can't guarantee, and maliciously consuming 3p data would nearly disappear
Google should not have known that someone would misuse their block list to block domains. But now that someone is misusing their block list to block domains, if someone brings it to their attention, the next time this happens, they will have known it.
I am not a lawyer, I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
"See details"> "ignore the risk" works for me. Even Chrome lets you ignore the warning if you click the details button. That's not the problem, though; the problem is that the registrar decided that the browser warning ("something might be wrong") as proof of malice (took down the domain entirely).
What is to stop everyone from doing this blacklisting?
Spyware filters used to boast about how many domains they filter out because they wanted you to buy their filters instead of someone else's. By the time they hit a false positive, they've already sold a year's subscription to that customer.
The incentives are different.
Step 2: Alter filters to mark newly-registered domains and low-traffic websites as "potentially harmful".
Step 3: Charge a lot of money for "business verification" - which gives them a fancy badge somewhere and incidentally makes their website trustworthy in the eyes of your filter.
Step 4: Profit!
The Big Tech cartel has been doing this pretty successfully with email (see the weekly "Don't self-host your email" posts), why should we assume they are doing anything different with browser-based website blocking?
Indeed. I was going to register an account somewhere the other day, and the signup form had a list of acceptable email domains. Gmail, Protonmail, Outlook, Yahoo, Icloud... a few others. It's not the first time that's happened to me. Sad.
EDIT: Didn't even include Fastmail, who's pretty big after all. They host MX for my domain, so I could have "circumvented" it that way with their disposable address feature, but nope.
Yeah, sounds like a great cartel idea, if they actually did that. None of my domains ever got marked as potentially harmful, even the one that I bought as a joke because it would be so easy to turn it into a phishing site.
Not everything is a big conspiracy to oppress the population. We hear about the cases where it goes wrong because the HN front page is the fastest way to reach the single part-time support person Google seems to employ.
- They make almost all their money on advertising
- They have deep ties to the US intelligence agencies (To the point that a Google employee managed the appointment calendar for our Secretary of State a few years ago!)
So, how would these incentives apply to their Internet blacklist?
- If you are parking lots of Google ad spam, they are taking a cut of your revenue, so they have an incentive to take you off the list (evidence and testimony from the antitrust trial documented ongoing fraud in every layer of Google's vertical ad monopoly)
- If you are hosting something the intelligence agencies dislike / are neutral to / like, that'll impact your presence on the list.
There is also the headache of PR issues when they get a false NEGATIVE. “Google didn’t protect grandma from this scam website!”
There is no incentive for adding false positives to lists of malicious websites.
Chrome is big enough that a website owner can't afford a false positive on their malware list, just like they can't afford to have all their email end up in spam for all Gmail users.
Due to their near-monopoly Google also has no incentive to avoid adding false positives to their blocklist - provided they don't accidentally block high-profile targets. And if a CxO is screaming over your shoulder that your website has been blocked, arguments about "false positives" aren't very compelling: they'll just demand you move off the "shitty basement provider" and switch to "proper hosting, like the Google Cloud"...
that whiny bullshit about somebody elses website? you dont have to rely on a website or app. either you need their monopoly because you cant do it yourself, or you have options.... in both cases the whining is not needed
It doesn't really matter that it's Google. It could have been Microsoft, or PAN, or McAfee or some fly-by-night vendor. The problem was Radix taking the list as iron-clad truth and disabling the domain without any notification or way to resolve the issue.
And Google has the right to publish a list, there should be more lists not less. But Google was at fault for not correcting their blacklist. Until the article appeared on Hacker News, this was not 0% on Google. A small, correctable mistake, but they deserved a tiny bit of blame.
If all it takes to be taken from the blacklist was to temporarily delete the NS record - the list would be useless against malware.
What stands out to me:
> Earlier this year, Namecheap was running a promo that let you choose one free .online or .site per account.
I wouldn't be surprised if most of Namecheap's customers who used the "register a domain for free" discount were indeed malicious. Without seeing the results of whatever analysis Google did to flag this website, it's hard to say whether Google is at fault here.
Libel suits can be financially catastrophic, so even a tiny false positive rate could present risk that disincentivizes producing such software at all.
And a threat detection mechanism that has a 0.0% false positive rate is conservative to the point of being nearly useless.
Scalable systems need to use heuristics to catch threats. Needing concrete evidence in every case means that an enormously higher amount of malicious resources will not be flagged.
There is a policy argument as to the right balance of concerns here. But there is a clear trade-off to make.
Giving everyone a fair trial just doesn't scale. It costs too much.
"Your Honor, we banned this person's website because his web page contained the word 'bitcoin' more than 5 times" will not hold up.
"Your Honor, we banned this person's website because it contains a bitcoin miner script. See, here is the script, and it matches the hash value found in these other attacks" hopefully holds up.
In other words, if you can't deal with the false positives in a timely manner. You SHOULD be liable for the damages.
I can't build a budget car put together in an unsafe manner. Then complain I can't compete due to all the peoples cars crashing and blowing up and suing me.
It’s not libel. Defamation requires a false statement of fact. Marking a website as “unsafe” is an opinion.
No, it's not.
You're welcome to cite case law if you want to insist. Otherwise, unsafe (in the context of infosec) has a definition of likely or able to cause harm or malfunction. Something that is provable or falsifiable with evidence.
I reported a falsely flagged site repeatedly for weeks with absolutely no action from them.
Mozilla and Microsoft both did actually remove the warnings after the reports (Edge and Firefox stopped displaying the warning). Google did not. Google strong armed me into registering for google products, like a fucking bastard of a company.
This was the moment I went from "I don't love google anymore" to "Google can get fucked".
I wish them bankruptcy and every damn legal consequence that is possible to enforce.
For clarity I'm not agreeing or disagreeing, but what means sense to the layperson (including experts in a particular field) is sometimes at odds with what the law says.
"In addition to establishing that the defendant was aware of his statement's defamatory meaning, the plaintiff also must show that the defamatory statement is false. The falsity requirement has evolved gradually through a two-step process. Initially, the courts recognized that truth was a defense in a defamation suit. With time, however, the burden of proof on the issue of the statement's truth or falsity shifted to the plaintiff, so that now a statement is not actionable unless it can be proven false."
https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?params=/c... (pp. 851ff).
If a typical page can be shown to be prima facie safe to well formed parsers, without obvious shell code. It would require a response if there was additional evidence google was using in their determination.
If the opinion is meant to be just another opinion, then it shouldn't cause any blacklisting of any sorts anywhere.
I agree with this! The registrar should not have triggered a suspension because of this. They're not obligated to, and the two processes should be decoupled.
No.
The source should be more careful. It's the equivalent of a renowned newspaper printing warning a restaurant being unsafe to visit. Should the customers' willingness to visit be magically decoupled from this opinion?
I'm not saying they should "ignore" reports of abuse but treat them as they are -- reports. They can then perform their own independent investigation.
That may well have happened here. I suspect the author isn't telling us something.
Fuck Google.
This is absolutely libel. They put a big fucking red banner on top of my site, telling the world that it's unsafe, using all the authority they have as one of the largest tech companies in the world.
In my case - it was a jellyfin instance I'd stood up to host family videos of my kids for my parents.
It was not compromised, and showed only a login page. I reported it as a false flag repeatedly, for weeks, with Google doing jack fucking shit.
Only after signing up in their search console and registering the site did the warning disappear.
They are abusively forcing people into their products. Fuck Google.
In case it wasn't entirely clear - Google can get fucked. Fuck Google.
> Libel is the publication of writing, pictures, cartoons, or any other medium that expose a person to public hatred, shame, disgrace, or ridicule, or induce an ill opinion of a person, and are not true
They literally show a giant red banner to every user of their browser that tries to access my site, calling me unsafe. Which is factually incorrect, and absolutely induces a negative opinion.
There's nothing on my site except a login page, it wasn't compromised, and it wasn't available for public access or registration. They can't "opine" on safety - it's just factually incorrect.
Convenient for them that the only way to resolve the issue is to sign up for Google products, though. Wonder how that works...
---
Next you'll try telling me that calling someone a cheat is also just an opinion, but it's standard legal libel.
“unsafe” is a term that is both broader and more vague, so I would consider it opinion unless backed up by appropriate facts (like “contains CSAM”, “contains malware”, and so forth).
Except when it isn't. CSAM may be easier to define and identify than pornography, but there still exists material that treads a moral grey area.
What you can't do is imply non-public knowledge, aka "I heard from my cousin who works in law enforcement that Kyle murdered a hobo when he was 12 but the records were sealed", or state specific facts that can be proven true or false: "Kyle murdered a hobo on September 11, 2018 out back of the 7-11 in Gainesville, FL"
The standard for libel/slander is much, much higher than people think. It's extremely difficult to meet them, and for public figures, it's almost impossible.
That's ... not quite true. I wouldn't go that far.
1A rights are construed really broadly. The courts don't do the 'he wasn't legally convicted therefore it's illegal to call him one' thing.
The First Amendment doesn't protect the speaker against all forms of defamation (though it does put some barriers up that make it harder to win in some circumstances). If it did, defamation as a cause of action wouldn't exist at all.
As a practical matter, though, this is largely theoretical. Once you've been through the rigamarole of arrest, prosecution, and trial, even if you're found not guilty of the crimes committed, the reputational damage is just too widespread. You're not going to go after the defamers: there are just too many, and if you tried, there would be a fair question as to whether you have any positive reputation left to injure. Your life is pretty much ruined. It's a pretty terrible situation for the wrongly accused.
For one, it's an opinion, and traditional journalism likes to pretend it doesn't have those.
The bigger reason is anyone can sue for anything in the US. Litigation can be ruinously expensive, and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars just to get it thrown out. Hundreds of lawsuits gets expensive, even if you win or hand out $25K "get lost" settlements.
(That's why SLAPP laws are so important -- a strong SLAPP law like CA kills this behavior)
Whether or not something is prudent behavior has nothing to do with legality.
In other countries local TLDs are of course normal (e.g. .it for Italy, .za for South Africa, .cn for China...) and not only used for scam links.
I dont care if their pre-LLM ai says "thingy bad". They are responsible for the scripts or black boxes they control. I dont care if they dont give a reason.
Claiming bad/malicious/etc site is 100% libel. And doubly so, anybody who has been forced to agree to a ToS with binding arbitration should have it removed for libel.
No it isn't. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/defamation
Please, use words correctly.
> a plaintiff must show four things: 1) a false statement purporting to be fact; 2) publication or communication of that statement to a third person; 3) fault amounting to at least negligence; and 4) damages, or some harm caused to the reputation of the person or entity who is the subject of the statement.
They falsely marked the site unsafe[1] on a published list[2], the results weren't checked and couldn't be appealed[3] and OPs site was taken down[4].
Opinions and facts in a legal context usually comes down to who is saying what. Someone personally says "this soup is bad" on a review site = opinion. A news site plastering it on their front page = fact.
A person saying something as an individual is usually considered an opinion. A company doesn't have that same protection.
Whom are you quoting here? A court opinion?
In the US, it really doesn't matter who says it, the only thing that matters is who it's being said about.
If you are a "public figure" -- which is a much broader category in 1A law than you think -- then in order to prove defamation, you have to prove the thing was false _and_ that the person saying it knew it was false at the time. Not that they were mistaken, not that they were careless, not that they knew later, they deliberately lied and knew they lied as they said it.
If your next question is "how do you prove what someone was thinking", then yes. That is the reason it's nearly impossible.
Opinions (Protected) vs Facts (Not Protected)
Defamation cases where individuals say something are usually considered opinions and companies are usually considered facts in the eyes of the courts. I say "Usually"
Defamation also DOES NOT require intent, but it requires a minimum level of fault (negligence)
Google saying something is unsafe in the web search or browser would not be considered an opinion because of their position of authority. It would not even be a debate since Google has already said they make decisions based on facts and data presented to them.
The only question is are they negligent in their assessment or response to a false report. And what would be the damages. In the case of a phishing report that is false courts would already consider it defamation per se (damages presumed)
Everything the Supreme Court rules is an "opinion." And they're the ultimate arbiter of legal questions in the U.S.
Whether a statement is a fact and whether the person who said it is considered an "authority" or not are independent concerns.
And we are also 100% talking about public figures. "Public figures" include companies and it's a critical part of 1A since Times v Sullivan.
Google is a US company and has 1A rights. That's how it works. The rest of what you said is nonsense and is your idea of how it should work, but has nothing to do with how it actually works.
Same with if they become aware of defamation and fail to retract and make a statement. But newspapers will generally also thoroughly investigate themselves to make sure what they are publishing is true.
"21(1) Parties to Offence: Anyone who actually commits the offense, aids in committing it, or abets (encourages) someone in committing it is a party to the offense."
I work in a law firm but NAL. I could probably find some cases if I had time. Most of the responses from people saying defamation is not very successful and "good luck" in the us because of 1A seem strange to me also.
I’m not sure you got the law right. “Abetting” does not mean encouragement. And the code itself does not have “(encourages)” in parentheses in it. The text of the code is right here: https://www.statutes.ca/r-s-c-1985-c-c-46/21
Since you work in a law firm, maybe you should ask your colleagues.
Perhaps spend less time picking apart comments and trolling on the internet if you do not know the definitions of words?
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/abet
1 : to actively second and encourage (something, such as an activity or plan) abet the commission of a crime 2 : to assist or support (someone) in the achievement of a purpose The singer was abetted by a skillful accompanist. especially : to assist, encourage, instigate, or support with criminal intent in attempting or carrying out a crime —often used in the phrase aid and abet accused of aiding and abetting a criminal
abet implies both assisting and encouraging.
And further,
https://nprobinson.com/blog/parties-to-an-offence-in-crimina...
Who Is Considered a Party to an Offence? Under s. 21(1) of the Criminal Code, you may be considered a party to an offence if you:
Section 21(1)(a) Committed the crime yourself (the principal); Section 21(1)(b) Assisted someone else in committing it (aided); Section 21(1)(c) Encouraged or promoted its commission (abetted).
I won't put quotes around the words this time.
You mean you had an LLM write it. This is the second time you’ve done that in this conversation. Please stop. It’s giving you incorrect or misleading information. Bona fide lawyers are finding themselves subject to disciplinary action for relying on LLMs, which have been found to falsify law and cases: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-appeals-court-or...
Please, I beg you, go talk to your colleagues instead of armchair lawyering here. The law does not always adhere to dictionary definitions. It has been interpreted over the centuries and courts follow those interpretations. Besides, “Encourages” is a different word than “abets,” and merely offering support in the verbal or spiritual sense is very unlikely to lead to prosecution and conviction. If you can find a single case in Canada where this has happened, show us the proof.
I’m not “trolling,” I am a lawyer myself with 3 years of formal training, a Bar license, and decades of continuing education.
If you give me the number of your law firm, I will gladly call them myself.
I highly doubt you are a lawyer.
It’s not libel. Defamation requires a false statement of fact. Marking a website as “unsafe” is an opinion.
The problem is that these gatekeepers of the internet respond to false statements of facts/opinions by so called professionals.
I had cloudflare mark a worker as phishing because a AI "security company" thought my 301 redirect to their clients website was somehow malicious. (url redirects are normal affiliate things)
If the professionals don't understand the difference and cloudflare and google blindly block things, this is scary.
I get that's mostly what corporate lawyers argue about, but it's functionally dishonest in this case.
That is more than an opinion. Chrome has a monopoly and should act accordingly. Blocking entry to a website should be a last resort, not just because someone didn't add their website to the whitelist.
I use Ubiquiti as an example for an update they pushed to their UniFi systems a long time ago (5+ years). Some people were configuring their devices to use an https URL to connect to a management console when it was supposed to be http. Before the update, the console accepted http on the https port. After it didn't. That caused devices to disconnect from the management portal and remain offline.
When people complained, Ubiquiti said they realized it would happen, but it "would only affect a tiny percentage of customers." However, most customers that were affected had a 100% rate of failure. One person had something like 600-700 devices that got disconnected and required manual reconfiguration.
A 1% failure rate might be ok for the company, but it shouldn't be if the 1% of people affected suffer 100% failure. The distribution of the failures needs to be considered.
I had my primary domain that my entire family has used for 25 years put on that blacklist. If I hadn't been able to get it removed it would have had a massive negative impact on my life. Had it been suspended by the registry the way the OP of this article describes, I'm not sure how it would have worked out.
So it may be a false positive of .0000000001%, but would have ruined my life. I have 900 entries in my password manager and probably half of them are tied to that domain. Is my entire digital life acceptable collateral damage? Is yours?
I don’t mean to say your experience isn’t real and that you didn’t suffer some inconveniences. But come on, have some perspective.
And what did you do to get put on that blacklist, anyway?
On the flip side of the coin I cannot get a site removed that is a blatant rip off of one of our websites being actively used for invoice redirection fraud.
Considering that getting a domain is a normal part of business these days, this kind of thing should be illegal. Not to mention, why does Google have any say in this?
Because keeping Google happy or at least not bothered is an existential priority for registrars
Which likely is slow without a poke it's reasonable to base the decision on whats available.
That's just how reputation works.
Et voilà ... ! this is precisely the slippery slope I warned about a decade ago. The indirect censorship becomes direct censorship, defeating all the arguments about the morality of such a list. And:
> Not adding the domain to Google Search Console immediately. I don't need their analytics and wasn't really planning on having any content on the domain, so I thought, why bother? Big, big mistake.
Yet more monopolistic power to Google.