Google Says The Entire Internet Will Harm Your Computer…. Run For The Hills!

For about an hour over the weekend, Google declared that every site on the Internet could harm your computer. At first, Google blamed stopthebadware.org for the screw up, but they eventually manned up to the screw up in their blog:

Unfortunately (and here’s the human error), the URL of ‘/’ was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and ‘/’ expands to all URLs. Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file. Since we push these updates in a staggered and rolling fashion, the errors began appearing between 6:27 a.m. and 6:40 a.m. and began disappearing between 7:10 and 7:25 a.m., so the duration of the problem for any particular user was approximately 40 minutes.

I suspect that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is laughing his head off over this. After all he’s been throwing chairs for the last few years over Google. It must be nice for him to hear some bad news about them for once.

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