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Then one day it suddenly hit me.. You see the thing is McAfee siteadvisor.com also sells these hacker-safe certificates to websites for $360 / year. With that i

by trotsky 16y ago

Then one day it suddenly hit me.. You see the thing is McAfee siteadvisor.com also sells these hacker-safe certificates to websites for $360 / year. With that in picture, this whole fucking thing just makes sense. This is just a ploy to sell those certificates. That is some serious ass jumping to conclusions. I feel for the guy, his situation sucks. BUT: He just up and one day decided that they're doing it to sell him some snake oil. - Nobody from McAfee suggested he buy the snake oil. - Nobody else told him, "oh that is a scam to get you to buy snake oil". - He didn't ask around to see if it's happening to a lot of other people. - He didn't try to buy said snake oil to confirm it would make a difference Clearly McAfee siteadvisor sounds broken/underfunded/lazy/all of the above. It sucks he can't get them to deal with it. But if it was some kind of cyber protection racket it'd be happening to a lot of people with similar results. And they'd have to give you some hints as to how to "get protected". I've hosted a number of websites with executables throughout the years including one that has a bunch and is active right now. I've never been on a McAfee blacklist. I've never even heard of anyone I know being on a McAfee blacklist. If it was some kind of protection racket wouldn't they just be mass flagging things? Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity - Hanlon's razor

ohashi 16y ago
They don't have to tell him. He is watching his customers disappear and business is hurting. He is spending all this time trying to figure out a solution. He did come around to the realization that for money, they will probably fix his problem that they created in the first place.
agj 16y ago
It doesn't sound like the OP tried very hard to resolve this before deducing this was all a scam that had to come to light. McAfee isn't going to resolve this out of goodwill after several email complaints -- I wouldn't trust them to. The OP needs to try harder to light a fire under someone's ass. McAfee has little to nothing to gain from bending to the whim of flagged sites. To say that the OP's experience would be different as a paying customer, either as a mere AV subscriber or as a subscriber to their hacker-safe service, is an unfounded assumption -- to say the next step is forking over protection money and that this is all a scam is pure sensationalist FUD. I'm firmly in the skeptic camp. Without any evidence, the OP's site could be legitimately flagged. Also, I sure as hell wouldn't let this linger for 2 years. Maybe I missed something though, I gave up on the comments after a minute, my tolerance to the reddit front page hivemind is very low. Also - thanks for introducing me to Hanlon's razor, it's now posted in my office.

by trotsky 16y ago

ohashi 16y ago

They don't have to tell him. He is watching his customers disappear and business is hurting. He is spending all this time trying to figure out a solution. He did come around to the realization that for money, they will probably fix his problem that they created in the first place.

agj 16y ago

It doesn't sound like the OP tried very hard to resolve this before deducing this was all a scam that had to come to light. McAfee isn't going to resolve this out of goodwill after several email complaints -- I wouldn't trust them to. The OP needs to try harder to light a fire under someone's ass. McAfee has little to nothing to gain from bending to the whim of flagged sites. To say that the OP's experience would be different as a paying customer, either as a mere AV subscriber or as a subscriber to their hacker-safe service, is an unfounded assumption -- to say the next step is forking over protection money and that this is all a scam is pure sensationalist FUD. I'm firmly in the skeptic camp. Without any evidence, the OP's site could be legitimately flagged. Also, I sure as hell wouldn't let this linger for 2 years. Maybe I missed something though, I gave up on the comments after a minute, my tolerance to the reddit front page hivemind is very low. Also - thanks for introducing me to Hanlon's razor, it's now posted in my office.