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| Tech-Pro.net - the MD's Blog | |
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Tech-Pro.net - the MD's Blog |
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At last! We're in the clear again
Thu, 10 Jul 2008 23:01:00 -0400 It seems that persistence pays off in the end. McAfee has finally restored our green rating. Yahoo! In my inbox just an hour ago was the following message: "Hello, This site has been moved to a 'green' rating: http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/tech-pro.net Sincerely, Jim Avert Services McAfee SiteAdvisor" Yahoo! is still publishing the red warning, but I guess we'll just have to wait for them to update their system from McAfee. And other sites like xaddr.com and The PC Guru still have the red rating they got from having links to tech-pro.net. It will be interesting to see how long it takes for their ratings to change. I'm pleased Tech-Pro.net has finally been cleared of course. I'd be happier if I thought that lessons were being learned that might prevent this from happening again in the future. Suggestions I've made in previous blog postings, like checking suspicious downloads with other scanners for a second opinion, or giving webmasters a chance to respond to ratings, would certainly avoid others from suffering this horrible experience. But it has happened to other sites before mine, and nothing was done about it then, so I guess it will happen again to others in the future. |
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One week on and still no action
Wed, 09 Jul 2008 23:49:00 -0400 One week has passed since I informed McAfee that SiteAdvisor was defaming my website by stating that it contained dangerous downloads when the virus it claimed to have found was in fact a false positive. And nothing has happened. The day after I submitted my complaint I received the following, probably automated, response from a SiteAdvisor support person: "Hello, Thank you for contacting us and your interest in SiteAdvisor. SiteAdvisor engineers will look into your issue, and will issue a change if it is deemed appropriate. Thank you for your patience during this process. Sincerely, Jim Avert Services McAfee SiteAdvisor" Since then, of course, Yahoo has begun publishing this libel on its search engine, and when contacted about it, refused to take any responsibility for it, telling me I had to resolve the matter through McAfee. McAfee has done precisely nothing. Today I sent the following reply back to the SiteAdvisor support representative: "It is one week since I reported this issue to you and there is still no action. It is all very well asking me to be patient but it is not your business that is being libelled. Furthermore we are receiving almost no traffic from Yahoo! now that they are publishing a red warning "Dangerous Downloads" against every search result from our website, causing us actual harm to our business as well as damage to our reputation. It is plain for anyone to see that this incorrect rating given to my site is the result of a false positive from your anti-virus software, and I have expert witnesses who will stand up in court and verify that if necessary. I am aware of some larger companies who have had harmful ratings resulting from false positives reversed within 24 hours so I know perfectly well you can act quickly if you need to - presumably when threatened with court action by lawyers. Is this really going to be necessary? Julian Moss, BSc. Managing Director Tech-Pro Ltd." It seems to me that McAfee is riding roughshod over the webmaster community, taking its time (or making no effort at all, according to some webmasters) to respond to complaints that its ratings are unfair or not merited. It avoids the risk of damages by dealing immediately with any complaint that is presented through a lawyer, leaving the legions of small businesses, hobbyists and others whose sites have been maligned but who can't afford legal representation fuming with anger but powerless to do anything. |
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False sense of security
Tue, 08 Jul 2008 14:11:00 -0400 Web safety tools like McAfee SiteAdvisor and Yahoo! SearchScan create a false sense of security. Quite apart from wrongly accusing safe websites like mine as being harmful, they encourage users to believe that sites marked as safe are safe. But that is simply not the case, because there are many bad sites that don't get a bad rating at all. I was reminded of this while checking out some Yahoo! search results just now. Searching of one product by its name, I was surprised to see an entry beginning "Top-Warez" appear on the first results page. Interested to see if Yahoo! was allowing software crack sites to be listed on the first page of search results, I clicked on the link. A page appeared, that appeared to contain content related to the product concerned. But before I could read it, the page changed to another site entirely. I closed the browser tab before any more harm to be done. Perhaps instead of promising safe search results that it does not deliver, Yahoo! should put a bit more effort into weeding rubbish like that out of its index. |
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Malware scanners, the new malware
Mon, 07 Jul 2008 15:59:00 -0400 When does the cure become worse than the sickness? Webmasters don't just run the risk of having their sites labelled "harmful" by badly designed spyware scanners. They are also having their website visitor statistics skewed in the name of web safety. In February, Czech anti-virus developer Grisoft added a component called LinkScanner to its product AVG. This pre-scans every link on a page of search results so as to inform the user whether the site contains malware. And webmasters are furious about it. The reason for their irritation is clear enough: The extra downloads of pages that the user may never actually see are creating extra traffic for websites - bandwidth stealing. The extra web page hits skew web analytics - such as monitoring the proportion of visitors to a page who achieve a desired goal like making a purchase or downloading a file - because they are difficult to distinguish from normal web traffic. It is possible to detect the LinkScanner traffic by searching for specific User-Agent strings. When I searched a tech-pro.net server log selected at random I found an insignificant number of such strings. Nor did I observe any unexpected increase in traffic in my logs since February. I only became aware of this issue today in discussions with other webmasters about my SiteAdvisor-related problems. So I can't help wondering if the effects are as bad as they are being made out to be. Nevertheless, Grisoft has decided to act on the complaints, and has announced that it has redesigned its LinkScanner so that it doesn't scan a web page until the user clicks on a link to it. It's a pity McAfee is not as responsive. |
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Yahoo! disclaims responsibility
Mon, 07 Jul 2008 10:53:00 -0400 The computer industry must be the worst on the planet for poor standards of customer service. Ask any computer user who has suffered a problem and most will tell you tales of being shunted from pillar to post and back again. The hardware manufacturer blames the software. The software developer blames the hardware, or someone else's software. It's always someone else's fault. It's a nightmare. I just had the same experience while trying to get Yahoo! to do something about it's defamation of the Tech-Pro.net website. I called Yahoo's London office and asked to speak to the legal department. However, after being asked what the issue was about I was told I had to speak to "Customer Care." Of course, this is a euphemism for "We don't care, we just want you to stop bothering us." When I repeated the problem, the customer care representative said "It's McAfee." She tried to put me through to somebody else, but when she was unsuccessful, she said that I would have to report the problem to McAfee, and she would send me a form to fill in. When I asked how quickly the defamation would be removed from the Yahoo! website I was told that she had no idea. It was up to McAfee. At this point I started raising my voice. I said that I understood perfectly well that McAfee had given my site the defamatory rating, but it was Yahoo! that was actually publishing the defamation, and therefore it was responsible for the damage it was doing to my company. But no, the customer care representative kept on repeating "It's McAfee, it's McAfee" and that I had to contact them to resolve the issue (which in fact I did last week, as reported here. I have still received no more than an acknowledgement.) I am not a lawyer, but even with my limited knowledge of the law I think I am correct in believing that if you publish false information then you are liable even if you were not the source of it. I am only trying to avoid the expense and hassle of going to court to get this slur on my business removed, but it looks as if I am going to have no alternative. |
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SiteAdvisor scareware misleads web users
Sun, 06 Jul 2008 17:45:00 -0400 The logic behind McAfee's SiteAdvisor web safety product is so flawed I am starting to wonder whether the company's lawyers have even looked at it. Do they understand how exposed to litigation their company is, because of this product? The potential for webmasters to take McAfee for a lot of money in a class action for defamation and loss of business seems immense. I think the only reason this hasn't happened yet is that many webmasters and online business owners don't even know that SiteAdvisor is defaming their site because they haven't installed the browser plug-in and can't see it. I have already blogged about how SiteAdvisor is defaming Tech-Pro.net by accusing us of distributing dangerous downloads, when in fact the McAfee malware scanner is at fault. McAfee has made fundamental errors in the design of its system for testing for malware: It is basing its verdict on the results of a single scanner, its own, despite the fact that false alarms are a common occurrence that nearly all scanners suffer from. It is technically insupportable to give a site a "dangerous" verdict without checking the offending files using other scanners to eliminate false positives. It is not informing webmasters of an impending bad rating, in order to give them time to respond. This is grossly unfair, since most webmasters won't even know their site has a bad rating if they haven't installed the SiteAdvisor plug-in. But not informing webmasters is also irresponsible since it denies them the opportunity to demonstrate that they don't deserve the bad rating by doing something about the problem - if it is indeed a genuine malware detection - which would help clean up the internet for all web users, not just those who use SiteAdvisor. Expecting site owners to find out for themselves about their SiteAdvisor rating, and then live with a black (or red) mark against their site until McAfee deigns to do a re-test is just not on. McAfee is not above the law. It has no right to say whether sites are good or bad. If it chooses to set itself up as a guardian of the web, it has a responsibility to be 100% correct. If it makes a mistake, it does not have the right to dictate when a bad rating is removed, and it should be liable for damages for every day that it makes a false and defamatory claim about a site. But if SiteAdvisor's malware tests weren't flawed enough, McAfee compounds the problem by blacklisting sites by association. Sites that link to another site that has been given a red "dangerous downloads" rating are themselves also given a red rating. So for example the web site of Alpha ZIP, an excellent archive manager developed by a respected member of the Association of Shareware Professionals, is given a red flag because it links to Security Software Zone, which has been condemned for linking to, as it happens, the same Spyware Doctor trial version that has caused Tech-Pro.net to get a red danger rating. SiteAdvisor is using who a site is linked to as an heuristic of whether it is good or bad, but it does not appear to be using any other common sense methods. If a site has had a safe "green" rating for a long time then the sudden appearance of a "dangerous" download should be treated as suspicious. SiteAdvisor is supposed to base its ratings on user opinions as well (though this is not much help for even modestly successful businesses like ours as most sites have few or no user contributions.) However, this did not help Security Software Zone mentioned above which had only "good" ratings until this false malware identification occurred. What is even more misleading about SiteAdvisor is that it is not giving sites the same rating for the same problem. So, for example, you could download the same file that has got Tech-Pro.net a "dangerous downloads" warning from Snapfiles.com, and receive no warning from Yahoo because SiteAdvisor has given SnapFiles only a yellow cautionary rating as the allegedly infected file represents only a "small proportion" of files. The site owner's comment suggests that SnapFiles was red rated a year ago for the same issue of false positive detections. One year and still McAfee has not done anything about this issue! I am all in favour of anything that singles out the disreputable websites and purveyors of malware from the rest. But McAfee SiteAdvisor as currently implemented is an absolute disaster, and that's not just my opinion but that of everyone in the industry I've communicated with about it. Is it really a genuine attempt to make the web a safer place for surfers? Or is SiteAdvisor scareware that needs a lot of yellow- or red-flagged sites to justify its purchase to consumers? |
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Gmail finally supports Signature Float
Sun, 06 Jul 2008 12:32:00 -0400 I am a big fan of Google's web mail service Gmail but I always hated its insistence on placing my signature at the end of any reply, below any quoted text. If typed my reply at the top of the message it looked wrong without my signature below it. If I added my reply below the quoted text, where the signature was, people would reply saying that they didn't see my response, and ask if I'd hit "Send" by mistake before typing anything. It was very annoying. For a long time I was a user of the Greasemonkey script Gmail Signature Float, which added options to specify where the signature appeared in Gmail. But updates to Gmail stopped this from working, and the author of the script did not have the time to update it. First, it stopped working in the US version of Gmail, and I had to switch to English (UK). Then an update to Greasemonkey broke even that, and I spent the next few months telling Firefox to skip updates to Greasemonkey. Finally Gmail released a whole new version and I had to start every mail session by selecting "Old version" from a link at the top. What a lot of hassle for such a simple feature! What I didn't find out until today is that the new version that I have been rejecting actually has an option to float the signature above the quoted text! Click on Settings, and then click on the option at the far right named Labs. On that page you'll find an option called Signature Tweaks, which places the signature where it ought to be, at the top. Three cheers for Keith C and Dave C, whoever you are! Your little tweak is just the job. |
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Now Yahoo! is libelling us
Sat, 05 Jul 2008 19:41:00 -0400 Now the search engine Yahoo! is defaming Tech-Pro.net and destroying our reputation by describing our site as a "potentially harmful website" and marking every search result from any of our domains with a red notice that says: "Warning: Dangerous Downloads." This is destroying our business and causing serious permanent harm to our reputation as a trusted site. And all because of a false detection of malware by McAfee's SiteAdvisor malware scanner, as I described in my previous blog posting. What makes this even more serious than the defamation by McAfee itself is that the libellous accusation will be seen not just by those who have installed the SiteAdvisor plugin in their web browser, but by every user of Yahoo! Search in the US, Canada, UK, France, Italy, Germany, Australia, New Zealand and Spain - a list which happens to include the sources of most of our traffic. As described in the SiteAdvisor Blog on 20 May, Yahoo! has partnered with McAfee to incorporate site safety ratings into its search results. Which would be a great idea, if the site safety ratings were to be trusted. Unfortunately in implementing its safety tests McAfee has overlooked one basic fact that anyone familiar with anti-malware scanners knows: that these products often give false positives. They often flag files as containing malware when they don't. And McAfee appears not to have built any checks into its system. It is passing verdict on the safety or otherwise of websites based on the results of just one anti-malware scanner - McAfee's. This is technically indefensible and criminally irresponsible. It is a lawsuit waiting to happen. The result of this is that any user of Yahoo! Search will find all the search results from tech-pro.net and related domains look like this: I can't imagine that this will have any effect other that to cause people to avoid that search result, causing immediate harm to our business and long-term damage to our reputation. I have used the Yahoo! Search contact form to send the following message: "Yahoo is defaming my website domain tech-pro.net by claiming that it contains dangerous downloads. This allegation has been made by McAfee Site Advisor. It is a false positive. See my blog posting at http://blog.tech-pro.net/entry/47/McAfee_defamation_of_Tech-Pron for full description of the matter including proof that the file Site Advisor claims to be infected does not contain spyware. This red warning above the search results for tech-pro.net is causing serious harm to our business and is a serious slur on our reputation. The longer this appears on your site the greater the damage that is being done. If this libellous warning is not removed within 24 hours we will be instructing our attorneys to take legal action against Yahoo! Inc for compensation for loss of business and damage to our reputation. Please reply IMMEDIATELY acknowledging receipt of this communication. Julian Moss, BSc. Managing Director: Tech-Pro Ltd." Tech-Pro Limited does not really have the resources to take on Yahoo! and McAfee, but we'll be out of business very soon unless we do something. Watch this space - and if you can do something to help us, please do so. |
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