The biggest downside to the NSA revelations is how quickly people accept conspiracy theories.<p>Wikileaks just released a big email dump. People looked at it with Google Chrome, and it detected malware in the archive. That blacklisted the site it was downloaded from.<p>There is no big "Google is protecting the Democrats and hates Wikileaks". Wikileaks was serving malware, and Google detected it.
This is technically accurate since I found out myself this week when browsing the AKP email leak. Some of the attachments in the emails were clearly malware of some sort. See for example: <a href="https://wikileaks.org/akp-emails/emailid/27482" rel="nofollow">https://wikileaks.org/akp-emails/emailid/27482</a>
I figure this link needs to stand here somewhere, even if it's just for someone trying to understand the political implications that this could have: <a href="https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/" rel="nofollow">https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/</a>
I don't think there's anything to see here. Google now tags it as "safe." The mechanism worked; the website administrators removed the malware, and the warning was removed.<p>See! Everything works in a rational way. There's no conspiracy.
More interesting is the debate here in the comments where people are unsure if it's legal for them to <i>read</i> something on the Internet. I doubt Google is censoring Wikileaks. Too obvious. But startling is the chilling effect nowadays.
it could be political, but it's probably because they're hosting all of the attachments from all of the e-mails that were leaked - including spam
[youtube.com] <a href="https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/safebrowsing/diagnostic/?hl=en#url=youtube.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/safebrowsing/diagn...</a><p># Some pages on this website install malware on visitors' computers...<p># Some pages on this website redirect visitors to dangerous websites that install malware on visitors..
its not a dangerous site anymore...<p>as of 7:15 PM PST.<p><a href="https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/safebrowsing/diagnostic/?hl=en#url=wikileaks.org" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/safebrowsing/diagn...</a>
I'm not sure that this is completely tin-foil hat worthy.<p>I was working at a defense contractor in 2010 when the big leak of all the cables occurred, and was forced to learn a lot of things I wouldn't have otherwise, including something that maybe a lot of people don't fully grasp:<p>When stuff like this leaks, if any of the information is considered sensitive/classified/restricted in any manner, the act of it being leaked does not dissolve its restricted status. In other words, if you are a regular US citizen and you go to Wikileaks and look at something that is classified without having the proper security clearance, then you're now on the wrong side of the law.<p>I don't think there's any political shadiness going on here, I think Google is just trying to be on the correct side of the system. Whether or not that system is on the right side of some moral or ethical line is a different conversation entirely.
This really doesn't matter. The kind of people who are concerned about the information revealed by wikileaks, Snowden, Manning and the burgeoning surveillance infrastructure have little reason to trust what Google says or does.<p>What seems off is the default kneejerk response especially in places like HN where one would assume a far more informed audience - working in the industry which is spearheading this - to brush things under the carpet or make discredited, desperate and increasingly irrational references to conpiracy theorists.<p>There have always been conspiracy theorists and always will be, but the current narrative on surveillance has moved so well beyond that point that to have this discussion tarred by these tired and banal references to conspiracy theorists is completely disingenious and makes those making these arguments look out of touch.<p>If you know what has been revealed so far it should not be difficult to engage with some degree of seriousness at the issues at hand without immediately resorting to strawmen.
Update: Over the weekend, I encountered some guy at a store who probably doesn't read HN. He believed that Google was deliberately filtering out WL for political/conspiracy reasons.<p>When I explained the automated malware protection (Safe Browsing or whatever the call it), he accepted that explanation (I had him at "emails have viruses") but he countered that "google filtered out wikileaks last time".<p>This concludes today's observation from IRL.
"Current Status: Not dangerous."<p>Did this change in the intervening (clock-check) 4 hours, or is there some definition of dangerous I'm missing?
Andrew Simpson was possibly the first to report. Comes very soon after DNC email leak.
<a href="https://twitter.com/Andrewmd5/status/756529847762087936" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/Andrewmd5/status/756529847762087936</a>
WikiLeaks.org is NOT SERVING MALWARE today. I validated this against 210 malware URL block lists with over 2.4m domains loaded in real-time in our NetSHIELD appliances. www.snoopwall.com Gary Miliefsky, CEO