Desiring Machine

I would hate to be the person or team who rolled out this half baked feature. Way to go! Does anyone do QA any more? Or perhaps Google was hacked by super elite hackers.

Google is bad for you?

This is what you see when you click the "google home page" link.

On the other hand it leads to some interesting meta commentary.

It does raise a question about how to properly implement these malware detector algorithms. The idea is important. Add a filter to prevent malware.

For the record this was a bug detected around 7:00 am PST, Saturday Jan 31st.

Update: Official explanation from Google Blog. Apparently a root “/” appeared in the blacklist, effectively blacklisting everything. Interesting glitch. For you UNIX heads out there this is almost as bad as the fabled “rm -rf /” command of death. For those confused this command is a remove everything from the root level on down without warning me. It is a way to basically destroy an entire system if you have root access. For the morbidly curious, here is a video of what happens when you run “rm -rf/” on linux. And for OS X. And of course there is a similar command for windows.

This is why it is always good to double check inputs into any system that accepts commands as text.

A humorous example fro xkcd.com