Saturday, January 31, 2009

For Emily - Google's "potentially harmful" flub

This morning Emily told me that every local site was displaying a security warning.

I was mildly concerned that her browser account had been successfully infected, and was thus providing nonsensical warnings.

Looking at the history records though, the problematic URL was a Google interstitial message. Looked to me like Google was having a bad hair day. It was, and it made world news ...
BBC NEWS | Technology | 'Human error' hits Google search

... Google's search service has been hit by technical problems, with users unable to access search results.

For a period on Saturday, all search results were flagged as potentially harmful, with users warned that the site 'may harm your computer'.

Users who clicked on their preferred search result were advised to pick another one...
When Google has a bad hair day, tens of millions of people worry. Maybe hundreds of millions.

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