Open a can of worms and the Lambton Worm pops out
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Google throws a wobbly
Interweb unsafe! Run away
Mon Feb 02 2009, 08:42
GOOGLE WENT a bit bonkers for nearly an hour over the weekend, labelling virtually every site on the Interweb as dangerous.
The message "This site may harm your computer" accompanied nearly every search result worldwide.
The firm initially blamed the services of stopbadware.org for the glitch but this turned out to be cobblers too.
In the end, a revised blog post confessed to "human error". It seems a Gurgler fiddled with the list of dodgy sites it got from Stopbadware.org and seems to have pressed the wrong key.
Doh!
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Gmail also did this to emails coming from Google, in late December
(Screenshot here: http://geek-is-cool.blogspot.com/2008/12/google-as-spam.html )
At least it defaulted to everything bad rather than everything good.
I think Google is a big enough entity that they can afford to have people working on a saturday, so it probably wasnt an issue :)
I never even noticed the glitch... I seem to use search less and less now, just dive straight into book marked sites.
'the URL of '/' was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file'
that's kinda drastic, isn't it? They clearly need Tim O'Rielly to publish a book on 'How to Configure Your Empire of World Domination'.
it wasn't for an hour. hardly lasted half hour for me. i appreciate google for fixing it so quickly, especially since it was a saturday morning.