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Videolan: Google refuses to take down or unlist domains with tons of malware
- NayamAmarshe 4y agoGoogle complicit in refusing to take down misinformation? I don't believe it.
- bobsmooth 4y agoJust baselessly accuse the website of hosting death threats. That will get it taken down.
- glogla 4y ago
- Gigachad 4y agoLet’s not forget the supermarkets that sell these people food and the electricity lines that run power in to the servers.
- cyberphobe 4y agoexample? EDIT: not that Google isn't in the wrong here, this just feels like you're trying to push some other political agenda.
- sneakerblack 4y agoWhat "other political agenda" would that be?
- raffraffraff 4y agoMy guess is kiwifarms, which famously went offline after Cloudflare said that they "had to act" because of an "imminent threat to life" (not actual quotes, but not my own words either, in a nutshell that's what they claimed)
- themitigating 4y agoCloudflare is not google
- eps 4y agoGetting in there though. They are shielding a ton of in-your-face malware, crack and blackhat sites and don't do much about it.
- themitigating 4y agoI don't care what they are doing right now. This discussion and thread was about Google. The original comment was "Just baselessly accuse the website of hosting death threats. That will get it taken down." A user asked for an example, then another user provided one but for Cloudflare. Which isn't an example of Google taking down a site
- raffraffraff 4y agoI was right though. (As in, I was right about what they were alluding to)
- cyberphobe 4y agosurprise surprise kiwifarms being brought up but not being compared to the to the original claims.
- bobsmooth 4y agoKiwifarms. And my "political agenda" is not wanting websites that don't violate the law being taken down.
- cyberphobe 4y agoObviously kwififarms defenders such as yourself try to muddle the facts: Google isn't taking down any websites or being asked to take them down, just delisting them from their own indexes. GP didn't claim this either, just said they werent hosting death threats. This is an easily verifiable claim, which would take someone at Google seconds to check, while it would take the court system many weeks and a lot of money to convict of a crime.
- DoItToMe81 4y agoThey're too busy delisting domains that follow the law to actually do anything of public worth.
- jackjeff 4y agoExample?
- Ztynovovk 4y agoTheir ass.
- Jorengarenar 4y agoAh, the famous Instytut Danych z Dupy
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- cyberphobe 4y agoGP is trying to vaguely gesture at imagined hypocrisy, has no actual point
- ezekiel68 4y ago
- bobsmooth 4y agoIs there a current legal dispute over the VLC trademark that would make this situation ambiguous?
- zaptheimpaler 4y agoAlternatively: Google prefers not to adjudicate on any given dispute any 2 parties with a website might have.
- josephcsible 4y agoBut Google does adjudicate on such disputes all the time, but usually only when the issue is wrongthink and not malware.
- themitigating 4y agoWhat wrong think is that?
- sumosudo 4y agoThere are no degrees of wrong think. I think you think wrong about wrong think.
- cyberphobe 4y agoSeems unlikely given their long history of adjudicating precisely this kind of dispute.
- ohgodplsno 4y agoUnless one party is a large conglomerate like Disney or Viacom, in which case they are happy to straight up give them the keys to the banhammer.
- habosa 4y agoMeanwhile the other day I did a Google takeout of my Photos and when I clicked the download link, Google warned me about malware on their own *.googleapis.com domain I think an ML black box is getting out of control
- CamperBob2 4y agoIn the future, Google will have only one employee, who will be issued a dog. The employee's job will be to reboot the ML black box when it crashes. The dog's job will be to bite the employee when he or she tries to do anything else besides that.
- simfree 4y agoGoogle Safe Browsing is going off the rails with silently Man in the Middling Chrome users. You will see traffic coming from logged in users via a Google IPv4 address, the user is unaware their traffic is being proxied for analysis. Flagging and locking the accounts for potentially malicious activity or dropping Googles ASN has been an effective fix. Another plus is much cleaner logs, as we were getting hundreds of attempted injection attacks from Google's ASN before dropping all traffic from them, and unlike Amazon they did not respond to abuse reports.
- actualwitch 4y agoThey have a storage.googleapis.com subdomain that you can upload files to, so it was doing the warning correctly.
- _8j50 4y agoWhat am I missing here? Why is google involved with this? Normally, you contact the abuse contact in the domain's whois or the IPs abuse contact. If they are on a bullet proof host, your only avenue for a take down is government agencies. (Edit: you can also ask the RIR to reclaim the subnet but I've never heard of that actually being done for reasons I am not fully sure about) What does google have to do with content take down? Even for delisting them from results you have other search engines people use and threat actors can and do use redirectors when that becomes an issue. It is whack-a-mole, best they can do is beat the TA's SEO unless they have a lot of time and resources.
- angry_octet 4y agoGoogle has by far the majority of searches (in this category, not counting eBay/marketplace/insta searches). Delisting or even pushing to the second page would drastically reduce the effectiveness of such malware campaigns. There are a number of super important software tools that big platform vendors have been obstinate or hostile to supporting or securing. VLC and putty spring to mind.
- _8j50 4y agoI repond to incidents where SEO is being used to selectively target users and compromise their network (typical ransomware gangs these days). VLC maybe special to certain types of users but I assure you there are many SEO optimizes malware delivery campaigns. Google is not a people company, they won't devote human resources for this nor would they implicitly accept responsibility for the content of search results by actively taking things down. This isn't how the internet works. Search engines search stuff, name servers host domains, etc... everyone has their role. Keep in mind, they won't give up and go home because google delisted something, they will just move on to a different domain. Google will not commit resources for vlc alone like that. Another thing I forgot to mention earlier is VLC can literally take over the domain themselves after a court filing based on US cybersquatting law (.com is US jurisdiction).
- angry_octet 4y ago
- bastard_op 4y ago
- jbk 4y agoPresident of VideoLAN here. The issue is two-fold here: - On Google Search, Google refuses to unlist websites that are clearly promoting adware, spyware and violating the brands of Open Source projects (VLC is not the only one impacted). In addition, the ads reported are never deleted. - On Google Chrome, the safe browsing team refuses to flag some websites, even after long explanations about what the binaries are doing. One of the reason is that "the binaries are too big" (sic.). The other reason, is that they scan only the installer, and of course, the installer downloads other things. This has been going on for years, at least 10. One of the most egregious one is VLC.de which inundates the German web. The thing is that it's not that they steal traffic (why would we care), it is that they install spyware, adware or other rootkits, all the time. This is why I say that Google Safe Browsing is a total joke, and that Google does not care about its users security.
- sieabahlpark 4y ago
- n3rv 4y agogod bless vlc
- handedness 4y agoI'm not surprised. Google has knowingly hosted (and profited by) ads promoting software driver and tech support scams which target the most vulnerable customers of virtually every major hardware and software company out there, and has done so for the better part of the last two decades. This, despite the years-long protests of many of these companies. Until there is a class action lawsuit with unprecedented punitive damages, or until regulators do their job and regulate it, nothing will change. Anyone want to lay odds?
- bobsmooth 4y agoAt least ublock tags vlc.de as a "badware" risk.
- currysausage 4y ago
- hdjjhhvvhga 4y agoI found a job for Darl McBride that would finally make him useful for the society at large. He should found a company whose sole aim would be suing Google for refusing to deal with DMCA requests filed by Videolan (and possibly other open source projects facing the same problem) on time. Easy money.