Google has nightmares and sees evil things

Google has nightmares and sees evil things

If you navigate to some of my tech articles you may be welcomed by the (not so pleasant but contrastingly colorful) harmful site ahead, proceed at your own risk warning:

No, the site wasn’t hacked (I checked and double-checked), I haven’t started hosting viruses or other nefarious things, the warning appears to stem from the fact that Google’s algorithms decided (after over a year) that they don’t like a particular program I link to  so decided to flag an entire category of articles as dangerous:

The indicated file is a programming tool for the (Chinese made) CH341-based EEPROM programmers I used and wrote about in a previous article. This file has been linked to and available for over a year on the site, and beside the fact that it’s Chinese-made (I admit that doesn’t tickle me in a good way), it is not detected as suspicious or harmful by any of other 83 scanning engines (scan result here):

Thanks to the fact that Google’s SafeBrowsing lists are used by all major browsers this warning is present in all browsers while accessing any of my tech/ articles. So until Google gets its fact straight and has less nightmares about invisible enemies, you’re free to browse those articles at your own risk. Or not, it’s your choice.

Later edit: Google was fast to act and cleared the warning within 24 hours of removing the linked file and requesting a review. However that doesn’t solve the issue of marking half a site as harmful for a single file linked in a single article in the first place. Not to mention that file is not identified as harmful by other scanners.

 

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