Joe Hewitt may harm your computer | Hacker News Reader

Joe Hewitt may harm your computer

google.com

13 pointsdanw15 comments

See, when I saw the Hacker News title for this, my first thought was "Good to know, I'll simply avoid installing Joe Hewitt." Now that I think about it, maybe a blanket policy of not installing people on my computer is a good one. Better just to stick to programs.

His site was indeed hacked recently, and it was harming my computer inasmuch as it was crashing firefox. I consider the google warning to be late but not incorrect.

Here's an email I sent to Joe on 2007-12-17. (It's really hard to make these kinds of messages not look like spam!)

----- Hey, I was checking out iui tonight, and your site seems broken.

The front page has JS that does something involving "fredkidns.com" and it repeatedly causes my firefox to fill memory. Kazehakase is able to show the broken page, though.

I think the blog top page is also hacked; other internal pages seem to be ok.

I apologize for the slang use of the word 'hacked' up there.

I meant 'vandalized, probably by means that required deep knowledge of a system to initially develop, although the vandal was unlikely the same person as the hacker who came up with the exploit'.

SiteAdvisor used to do some really cool things before they were bought -- looks like google is trying to replicate that...http://www.siteadvisor.com

Makes sense. How many of the plugins sites try to install are actually useful?

I wonder if Google will whitelist the page once this comes to their attention.

I heard Google doesn't like fixing stuff manually. They'd rather fix their algorithm instead.

But if they can't fix your problem by fixing their algorithm, you're basically fucked.

> But if they can't fix your problem by fixing their algorithm, you're basically fucked.

I think it's reasonable to say that the algorithm isn't worth much if it has such false positives.

What is this?

It's Google's malware warning system gone astray.

Joe Hewitt is the creator of Firebug and a Y Combinator company founder and all around good guy.

Oh, I get it now! :-)

Joe Hewitt is a YC founder? For what company? Are you Joe Hewitt??

parakey (acquired by facebook)

Whatever happened to parakey?

I asked this a while ago on here because I was wondering if parakey was going to end up integrated into Facebook. A YC founder answered that he didn't think Parakey had gotten very far before the acquisition and that it was a talent acquisition.

I am not Joe Hewitt. I was in the same YC program as Joe, however, and my name also happens to be Joe.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com