Saturday, May 23, 2015

No Hesitations is Not a Phishing Site!

Google's "automatic system" a few days ago "determined" that No Hesitations (fxdiebold.blogspot.com) was a phishing site. (Phishing sites attempt to scam users into revealing credit card numbers, etc. No Hesitations is not a phishing site! Indeed it's obviously impossible, as readers are never asked for any information of any kind.) So Google shut it down, with only a terse and uninformative machine-generated "no-reply" email to me. Literally, No Hesitations just vanished! I then found a way to request a human review, which Google did. They immediately agreed that they were mistaken, and they restored the site. HOWEVER, they neglected to remove No Hesitations from Google's "Safe Browsing" blacklist, so that a warning may appear when you attempt to access the site, depending on your browser and its settings. Obviously I have notified Google of this remaining problem, which they'll hopefully fix soon (although it's not obvious, as all the automated Google stuff is very much a black box). Meanwhile, if you get the bogus warning, just click on "details" and then "visit this infected site," and you'll be in. (Regarding "this infected site," thanks a lot, Google. Totally insulting, and surely harmful to the site's traffic. Isn't your motto "Don't be evil"?

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