Posts in PC & Peripherals

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Google calls every site bad names

Darius Chang | Feb 02, 2009

If you are a diehard weekend surfer, you would have noticed that at 11.30pm (GMT +8) on January 31, something was very wrong with Google. For 40 minutes, even entering a safe Website like http://www.sesamestreet.org would result in the Web engine flagging it as a dangerous page which may harm your PC.

Google routinely checks for unscrupulous sites which may infect or steal information from your PC simply by visiting them. If you insist on entering the page despite the warning, you'll need to enter a security code or cut-and-paste the URL link directly. These methods also worked during the 40 minutes downtime when every Web site was flagged as dangerous.

According to The Times, this was the result of a Google employee who unintentionally entered "/" in the list of harmful Web pages. As every site starts with ftp:// or http://, this was the cause of the incident and was not an action by hackers. So did this cause you to lose confidence in the search engine, or have you forgiven it as a minor hiccup which could have happened to anyone?

Filed under: PC & Peripherals
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Windows 7 less annoying, but also less secure?

Ina Fried | Feb 02, 2009

Microsoft's efforts to make Windows 7 less annoying than Vista may also be making it less secure than its predecessor.

With Windows Vista, the operating system popped up a warning any time a major change was being made to the system, whether by the OS or by a third-party application. With Windows 7, users can choose how often to be notified, with the current default set to notify only when a third-party application is making a change.

Blogger Long Zheng, however, is drawing attention to an apparent shortcoming in that approach. Because changes to the user account control setting itself are being made within the OS--and not by a third party--malicious code could turn off such alerts entirely with the user getting little notice that such a change had been made. Zheng said he and fellow blogger Rafael Rivera have come up with a simple proof-of-concept code to show the vulnerability.
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Filed under: Notebooks, PC & Peripherals
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