News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Never Buy A .online Domain by grayhatter on Wednesday February 25, 2026 @10:35AM (#47152948)
> 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.

Re:Never Buy A .online Domain by jcalvinowens on Wednesday February 25, 2026 @11:39AM (#47153946)
Isn't "oops we made a mistake" actually a valid defense to libel in most US states? I thought you had to prove it was intentional to some extent? Or reckless/negligent IANAL
Re:Never Buy A .online Domain by horsawlarway on Wednesday February 25, 2026 @12:18PM (#47154471)
Google takes no action to review the reports that their warnings are false until you sign up for Google products (namely - registering the site in their search console).

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.

Re:Never Buy A .online Domain by jcalvinowens on Wednesday February 25, 2026 @12:37PM (#47154815)
I'm not defending google, I'm just wondering if claiming libel is barking up the wrong legal tree.
Re:Never Buy A .online Domain by rtsam on Wednesday February 25, 2026 @11:52AM (#47154104)
"I believed it to be true" is a defense. But negligence isn't. In fact, that is usually what you want to prove, that they acted on things that a reasonable person (or a person that is supposed to be skilled in that field) can see is not true.
Re:Never Buy A .online Domain by otterley on Wednesday February 25, 2026 @02:48PM (#47156842)
Negligence is an element of the tort of defamation.
Re:Never Buy A .online Domain by ifh-hn on Wednesday February 25, 2026 @10:53AM (#47153201)
Whether that's true or not is irrelevant if it's defined by law differently. Even without case law and precedent you'd still have to test it in court, which for libel can be prohibitively expensive.

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.

Re:Never Buy A .online Domain by otterley on Wednesday February 25, 2026 @02:53PM (#47156914)
I'm curious as to how you would prove that it would be impossible for any resource accessible under a given DNS domain to ever cause harm to anyone else.
Re:Never Buy A .online Domain by pocksuppet on Wednesday February 25, 2026 @05:24PM (#47158923)
You don't. Google has to prove that something on that domain can cause harm.
Re:Never Buy A .online Domain by otterley on Thursday February 26, 2026 @05:46PM (#47173159)
I'm afraid that's not how it works in modern law in the U.S.:

"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).

Re:Never Buy A .online Domain by grayhatter on Friday February 27, 2026 @10:34AM (#47181730)
You'd enumerate the resources the server sends, for a typical page load/request and demonstrate they're all valid js/css/html etc.

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.