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Comment by yjftsjthsd-h | Hacker News Reader

... so, materially yes? As a user, I don't care that they have an excuse, I care that they said "this file is a virus" when the file was not a virus.

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Not really. "Lying" includes an intent to deceive. I would have been okay with "raises false alarms", "generates false positive" or even "confuses and/or misleads users".

As a user, I want to be better safe than sorry - but would perhaps be happier with a finer classification than "no problem/OMG VIRUS!"

I agree that finer classification is needed. However: if you decide to declare to a user that every individual file that might contain a virus does contain a virus, that's intentionally deceiving them. It's deciding "X% of the time, this statement will not be true, and we are ok with that" instead of building the uncertainty into the statement itself. So I don't see how this can not be considered lying, unless they believed there would be no false positives.

Until the moment where you really need that file.

This. Firefox has become far more aggressive in policing use. For ex., if HTTPS is misconfigured 60.0.2 no longer offers an option for one time exceptions, now there's only 'get me out of here' and 'report to mozilla' buttons. Perhaps someone more familiar with ff's config knobs will post the knob name.

I'm running 60.0.2 and I still have the option to add an exception, under "Advanced". What you describe only happens when the site is so badly misconfigured that no connection is possible (e.g. protocol errors).

You cannot add exception for domain using HSTS.

Having false positives != lying.

Not inherently, but in this case all positives are matched to the same wording, and that wording expresses 100% certainty to the user that something in the file will harm their computer. That's a lie, because that is not what has been determined at all.

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