Google is reporting itself as a malware distributor. | Hacker News Reader

Google is reporting itself as a malware distributor.

google.com

112 pointsLachlanArthur40 comments

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What IS interesting is that you can actually put in any other domain and find the results of malware diagnostics.

http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=http://ww...

http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=http://te...

http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=http://ok... (one Czech discussion server I visit time from time)

and so on.

Not just hostnames, you can plug in things like Autonomous System Numbers and get reports:

http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=AS:15169

http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=AS:6327

http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=AS:17464

That can't be working right. It doesn't even check if the site parameter is actually a site - http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=gobbledyg...

Smells like...a bloomier filter!

The alternative, Google turning a blind eye to its own domain, would be far worse.

Forgive my ignorance, but why don't companies program the copyright year to automatically update?

Because that would basically make the year meaningless.

The year is supposed to be the first year the work was created. You can do 2008-2012 if you want though (and let the end year automatically update). But since that's the assumption if you don't include the end year, there isn't any reason to do it.

The content of Facebook wasn't first created in 2012, so I'm not sure if you're correct. In fact, I've noticed that the majority of sites don't include a date-range. Regardless, thanks for the info.

Didn't Facebook just update their website thus having a new copy write?

No, it's a mistake, they should have left the original date. If you update it you are supposed to do year, year, year or a range.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_notice

I still doubt that Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, Twitter, etc. are all mistaken in listing the current year in their copyright. That seems implausible.

Things aren't as cut and dry with legal traditions. I'm sure there are tons of scraps of legal language that remain in use only because it's traditional and few people know any better. Like some kind of legal shibboleth.

1. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3541501 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_rights_reserved

I don't know. They might have; but I doubt Microsoft, Yahoo, and Twitter did as well.

I quote the US government: http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-definitions.html

"and the year of first publication"

It appears that you're correct, but I'm still having a hard time believing that the legal departments of almost every major company make the same mistake. That makes me think that there is something we're missing.

They could be counting the year it was rendered on your computer. That seems a bit wonky though.

I'm going to guess the missing thing is that the legal department wasn't the one that implemented the autoupdating date.

IANAL but for web pages, especialy dynamic ones, "the year of first publication" seems to be a flawed concept. You could as well say the page is first published everyday.

About the presence of rogue engineers playing with copyright notices at will in big companies, some yahoo properties go through the hassle of manually updating the copyright notice every year under the explicit request from the legal department.

Surely dynamic updates are "republished" not "first published" after the first time the page is created.

Not unless it's the same content. Arguably if some of the content is old (old blog posts, tweets, etc.) then you should use a range of years.

As many others have pointed out the whole thing is just a signalling mechanism, and not a strict requirement -- "(c) 2012" says, "Don't steal this stuff, it's copyrighted, and we have actively maintained this page through 2012 so we aren't a company from the stone age."

And when the legal department noticed the error they didn't want to go through all the hoops to get it fixed, as legally it has no meaning. Also, as we see many people seem to think that you need to update the year, so they might have done it on purpose even.

The page you're looking at was just created.

with the way copyright works, is the notice necessary at all? if you put the wrong date at the bottom of your website, it doesn't invalidate your copyright. i could put © 2047 at the bottom of my site if i wanted to.

It isn’t. Copyright is automatic.

Copyright is automatic where it is automatic. In the United States you don't need a copyright statement. Also, no matter where you're from, "all rights reserved" is meaningless (post-Berne Convention).

It's (as I understand it) legally meaningless, but it's not "meaningless": it's a socially acceptable way to express the sentiment of "this is not open source or in any way something I am sharing with the public". Avoiding confusion is a good thing. It's like the opposite of a GPL COPYING file.

its actually different for www.google.com and google.com. Any googlers care to explain why?

is it possible that google.com also includes subdomains like plus.google.com?

Don't be evil.

Don't be a jackass.

interesting.

well sorry for it not being as interesting as i thought...

A post that just says "interesting" is noise, so people will downvote it.

damn, and here i thought i was "safe".

but apparently someone said its a repeat, and a fake, and yet offers no explanation why. Do you know why?

Heh, working as intended I suppose.

Repeat: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=934669

Not really - that's about Google listing Dropbox.com as suspicious. This is about Google listing Google as being a source / intermediary for malware.

Don't be evil?

So, this is the final proof that the mantra has been forgotten and Google has move to the dark side… Is it?

No, it shows exactly the opposite. Google doesn't except it's own servers from the malware search.

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