Warning – visiting this web site may harm your computer!

Try this link, and click the top result: http://www.google.com/search?q=bugs+lyrics+lyricsandsongs

You should find that rather than immediately getting the lyrics to Pearl Jam’s ‘Bugs’, you get a warning about potential bugs. If it is not operating in your local google, this link should show you the google error page I am getting.

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Warning – visiting this web site may harm your computer!

You can learn more about harmful web content and how to protect your computer at StopBadware.org.

Suggestions:

* Return to the previous page and pick another result.
* Try another search to find what you’re looking for.

Or you can continue to http://www.lyricsandsongs.com/song/817.html at your own risk.

Advisory provided by Google

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Now I’m not sure where I stand on this. On the good side, this stops people from maliciously infecting machines if the user is foolish enough to use IE on the open internet – the online equivalent of procuring prostitutes in phuket without prophylactics – or they compulsively click “Yes please download my dodgy software”

The obvious ‘con’s of this are it is purely reliant on the quality of Badware.org’s data, potentially open to abuse by interested parties, and also opens doors to further censorship potentially in the future…(Warning – visiting this web site may harm your Mind! – immediately occurs.)

I won’t enter into a tedius discussion of potential liabilities GOOG could face as a result – that can be left to Slashdot – but I will say if you’re worried about censorship of your search results, then Google is already doing that (although under litigious duress usually).

In all I’d still say it falls under ‘do no evil’…but probably going to annoy me more than anything, as I’m now (apart from one sandboxed testing machine at work) a pure Ubuntu operation, so it’s one more click for no gain.
If it cleans up the interweb a bit though, a good thing, though people will no doubt always find idiotic ways to infect themselves.

Related posts:

1. Click To Activate And Use This Control

Tags: Google, malware, search, Web