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Comment by danpalmer | Hacker News Reader

> since Google's safe browsing has decided to block the entire domain instead of the offending subdomain

This does, unfortunately, seem to be the right call. There's no way to differentiate between the subdomain user being malicious, the domain owner being malicious, or the domain owner getting hacked. The only granularity of data available is that something under the start.page domain was distributing malware, so it makes sense to quarantine the whole domain.

I hope this gets resolved quickly! I think the response is likely the correct one though.

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But why isn't google.com blocked? I see no reason to accept any rationales that don't apply to themselves.

Why _would_ they block themselves? How would that be to their advantage?

Irrelevant. Google does something and gives a rationale for it.

If that rationale were valid, it would apply to everyone, including google.

If the rationale does not apply to google, then it does not apply to anyone else.

Please gooogle (if they let you) the concept "double standard".

My point is not whether the rationale is valid or invalid: the point is, they're not going to do it. Is that wrong, in the ethical sense? Quite possibly. Do they care? No.

Try googling the "Golden Rule" and you'll find a version that says "they who have the gold make the rules".

You had no point. Obviously the reason anyone applies a double standard is to advantage themselves. Congratulations on that insight. Can you next explain why anyone would steal?

Oh, sorry, I thought you wanted to have a discussion, I wasn't clear on the fact that you just want to be a condescending dick. Have a nice life.

The rationale does apply to everyone: "if you're a big enough content hoster that we've heard of you before, we'll reach out to you rather than blocking your domain immediately". Google doesn't just make an exception for themselves, it also makes an exception for Microsoft, Dropbox, Box, Facebook, and probably hundreds of others that are too small for me to know about.

We can argue about whether this is fair to small players, but it's hardly self-dealing for Google to include themselves in their list of high-profile content hosters, and there are very rational reasons for maintaining such a list.

For the same reason why Dropbox and One Drive and GitHub and Facebook and all the other big services don't get blocked: because they're big enough and well-known enough as content hosters that the default assumption is that they have a bad user rather than that Microsoft went rogue.

It's not fair to smaller and newer players, but it's perfectly rational and isn't a uniquely special feature of Google.

Correct, but the whole point of a rhetorical question is that everyone already knows the answer, and anyone who would try to defend the invalid argument would not be able to answer the question in any way that supports the invalid argument, such as whatever excuse google or a google apologist might try to give for the double standard exposed in this case.

Because google drive is in the PublicSuffixList and listed as a hosting provider is my guess.

I checked on this and that's not true. The public suffix list applies to anyone who lets out subdomains anyways and google drive is not a service to which this applies. Blogspot on the other hand is in the list.

This does make for a really tricky future though tbh. It’s trivial for folks to password protect a zip file containing malware and for it to be uploaded to google drive or Dropbox and then be linked to from a start page.

If there’s a risk that each time that happens the entire domain could be blocked, that’s a lot of risk to try and mitigate. Especially seeing that many of the bigger providers also struggle to mitigate this kind of content despite having technical teams that are larger by an order of magnitude (or more).

> There's no way to differentiate between the subdomain user being malicious, the domain owner being malicious, or the domain owner getting hacked. The only granularity of data available is that something under the start.page domain was distributing malware, so it makes sense to quarantine the whole domain.

Or, you know, take into account the number of subdomains serving malware relative to the total number of subdomain.

1 out of 1000’s seems unfair reason. If it was 10’s or 100’s of subdomains out of 1000, then it makes more sense to punish the whole domain. But when it’s just a few, blocking the individual subdomains would be the better way.

Yes there is. PublicSuffixList does that.

Yep, and start.page is not on it.

I empathise with the viewpoint, but I don't think you're thinking like a hacker about this.

If safe browsing only blocked the subdomain when you have a certain threshold of "safe" subdomains, then attackers would just have a sufficient number of "safe" subdomains.

Also how do you set the threshold? It's dependent on the market that the subdomain hosting provider targets, it's dependent on how good their moderation is, it's dependent on how quickly they get indexed, all sorts.

Any solution needs to work for the case of malicious users, and needs to work at a scale of billions of pages, i.e. you can't use any human review or non-machine-identifiable information.

> If safe browsing only blocked the subdomain when you have a certain threshold of "safe" subdomains, then attackers would just have a sufficient number of "safe" subdomains.

If a website has a.example.com, b.example.com, foo.example.com, baz.example.com and they serve malware on baz, I’m saying put that subdomain on the bad list. If they serve malware from many subdomains, block the whole domain.

The issue is that Google blocked a whole domain for just one bad subdomain. That seems too strict, and is very sad for all of the users of that domain.

So to distribute malware, I can buy a domain, set up a thousand subdomains, but only put malware on one of them. Then when that gets found I can move the malware to another, and so on, always being able to trivially work around blocking?

At least when done at the domain level there's a cost involved for getting a new domain, which disincentivises the creation of many malware hosting domains.

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