Facebook's dirty game against Google+ | Hacker News Reader

Facebook's dirty game against Google+

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24 pointsantonellis8 comments

I'm not at all a fan of Facebook, but I'm inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt here since the author of this article doesn't provide any evidence at all that this problem was a deliberate ploy by Facebook to hurt Google+, let alone that Facebook is "paying Symantec to take the blame for the lie". Much more likely that it's a bug.

As Hanlon said: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

Plenty of people commenting on that G+ post verified the issue, really what are the odds that of all things false positives would happen on Google+....

Hi HN! I work for Facebook's Public Policy Team focusing on our Security efforts. Unfortunately, this was indeed a glitch in our spam prevention system.

We integrate with many different external blacklists (https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-security/link-shim-p...) including Norton and when there's a block on their service we provide a warning to our users. I have already reached out to Norton to notify them, however, the cause for the block is a question best suited for their team. We only use our external blacklist system to protect our users and would never use it to reduce traffic for competitive reasons.

Can't read it because I'm signed into google but don't have a profile and google+ account. Google won't let me view the link without first joining google+. That's dirty!

I'm in the same boat as you, but I can read it ok.

While signed in to my Google account, I can't view the public google+ post posted above without being forced to create a Google profile. Public google+ posts appear in Google's search results. Doesn't that mean that anyone should be able to view it, not just members? Isn't that Cloaking which is against Google's own TOS?

Yes - its meant to be a publicly available page. Not sure what's happening for you - I too am signed into google, but have not created a public profile nor do I have a google+ account.

I'm not even signed in, and I can read it fine. I think there must be some other bug going on here.

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