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Comment by elcapitan | Hacker News Reader

> The second category, uncommon downloads, covers downloads which may not be malicious or unwanted but that are simply not commonly downloaded.

> it is possible that you have been tricked into downloading a malicious file from a phishing site which has not yet been identified as such by the Google Safe Browsing service.

Does this mean that sites that have some kind of personalized downloads or downloads that are created on the fly (like generated PDFs for example, or watermarked content) will always create a warning for the user on download?

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This only applies to executables I think, as I've never seen the warning on Firefox Nightly.

Still something I'd consider an anti-feature, as it both punishes small software authors/projects and creates confusion on new releases even for bigger projects.

Browser security and anti-malware in general is increasingly a nightmare for small ISVs that release software that does anything remotely suspicious (eg DLL injection).

As a personal anecdote, my website has been blacklisted multiple times by safebrowsing, downloads have been blocked as "XXX is malicious", multiple AV products have found "malware" in a program that's never even been released before, etc. I have to email 10-20 different anti-virus companies with samples every release and then deal with the ones who want it in a different format or submitted through a web portal instead.

Then we have the problem that contacting any human about safebrowsing false positives is nigh impossible. Take a look at the report right now - https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/safebrowsing/diagn... - "Some pages on this website send visitors to dangerous websites. Some pages on this website install malware on visitors' computers." yet it says "Current status: Not dangerous". And Webmaster tools can't seem to find anything specific: http://i.imgur.com/HzT8xfC.png

Given that google has proven pretty indifferent to who its robots run over, one wonders why we should trust them to build self driving cars.

Just today I was having trouble making a Windows installer flash drive because Trend Micro didn't like Rufus trying to make an autorun.inf file. Had to add it manually.

I'm not sure if the "Windows 10 Media Creation Tool" also has this problem since it doesn't recognize Sandisk flash drives as being flash drives (presumably Sandisk's fault). If anyone's run it on a computer with Trend Micro I'd be curious to hear.

as it both punishes small software authors/projects and creates confusion on new releases even for bigger projects.

Do you have actual evidence of this happening? I get no warnings for my own stuff, even though I'm sure it's pretty uncommon :-)

We ship an nw.js-wrapped version of one of our apps for offline use in the field, and it certainly does provoke the "uncommon download" warning in Chrome. We've had people raise concerns about it. Market positioning insulates us from serious ill effect, but I can absolutely see how it could impair companies that aren't.

Thanks for the clarification!

I wondered that to.

> For example, if you are looking to download a new version of Firefox or a popular software package such as VLC and get this warning

Am I reading to much in to this, or are they doing something clever to only apply this "uncommon downloads" thing for popular search terms?

(This would avoid penalising small producers to)

We don't know how Google's grading works, but you may be on to something. I publish several free tools and games for Windows, and they're all raw executables without any kind of code signing.

Internet Explorer continuously blocks them and scares the users away from them.

Neither Firefox nor Chrome trigger a warning on them and seem to recognize them as harmless.

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