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This site may harm your computer - Google warning about cran website

7 messages · Gabor Grothendieck, Erik Iverson, Barry Rowlingson +3 more

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This is extremely annoying (and it smells of rat). 
As of this time (1013 am ET), Google issues the following nasty warning: "This site may harm your computer"
when I try to visit any of the CRAN package repository sites or CRAN task view. 

The funny thing is that Google's Safe Browsing Diagnostic page (it gives diagnostics about any page that
it may contain Malware) does not seem to be working at the moment, so that the problems that it found
with CRAN are not available for review.

Anyone else has the same problems? 

Christos Argyropoulos

University of Pittsburgh

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I am having this same problem with a huge number of sites, not just
CRAN.

On Sat, Jan 31, 2009 at 10:19 AM, Christos Argyropoulos
<argchris at hotmail.com> wrote:
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What OS/browser versions are you guys using?
Christos Argyropoulos wrote:
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2009/1/31 Gabor Grothendieck <ggrothendieck at gmail.com>:
Google seem to have fixed it now. Almost every site had this warning
attached. Don't panic. The internet is safe (unless Jen drops
it...[1]).

Barry

[1] The IT Crowd (UK TV show)
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On 31/01/2009 10:19 AM, Christos Argyropoulos wrote:
I suspect that the server that maintained those records was down, and 
their fallback was to assume that if it didn't respond, there was a 
problem.  The error message therefore showed up almost everywhere, but 
is fixed now.

One speculation:  The error page told you you could go to the selected 
URL "at your own risk".  Does that mean they'll assume responsibility 
that all links are safe if they don't warn you?

Duncan Murdoch
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Hey all,

Just now I ran into this update on Google Blog explaining the whole incident:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/this-site-may-harm-your-computer-on.html
On Sat, Jan 31, 2009 at 11:03 AM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca> wrote: