Dropbox.com blocked by Google?

http://safebrowsing.clients.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=https://www.dropbox.com/

by alunny • 17 years ago

44 23 17 years ago

safebrowsing.clients.google.com

SwellJoe2• 17 years ago

Since it is effectively a free and anonymous hosting service (files hosted can be shared publicly via HTTP), I can easily imagine it being used for distributing malware.

catch23• 17 years ago

though couldn't any of the file storage places have the same issue (mosso, s3, etc)?

shaddi3• 17 years ago

Because they just switched domains (getdropbox.com to dropbox.com), they haven't built up a positive reputation on their new domain yet. As a result, only a handful of instances of malware being served by a user can get the domain blocked.

I wonder how effective this sort of attack would be against Dropbox in the future.

SwellJoe2• 17 years ago

though couldn't any of the file storage places have the same issue (mosso, s3, etc)?

They aren't free and anonymous, are they? The free and anonymous part tends to be important to malware distributors. Exploiting existing servers is one way, but free sites are also used quite heavily.

patio113• 17 years ago

The quickest way to get this resolved is to make it a PR issue for Google.

One suggestion: "It has been widely rumored that Google is developing GDrive, a cloud based file hosting service. Today, Google has blocked Dropbox, a cloud based file hosting service which would compete with GDrive, from appearing in its index. Is it fair that Google can unilaterally cause its competitors to essentially disappear from the Internet, without possibility of appeal, for reasons known only to them?"

sweis2• 17 years ago

Sites are automatically flagged when malware is detected. Dropbox may be serving malware without knowing it. This page has instructions about how to request a malware review: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answe...

patio113• 17 years ago

Google is well-aware that doing business on an Internet scale means you start clocking measurable economic losses immediately when the site goes down, and for all intents and purposes Google has just handed Dropbox a service interruption because Google far and away the most powerful entity on the Internet. I can't even bring Dropbox up in my browser by typing in their domain name, to say nothing of the majority of Internet users who use Google as their primary means of navigation.

If it were my business that was down, I'd go for the PR route before asking for a review, because you know what? Google sucks at putting a human in the loop. They hate it. It costs money and doesn't scale to the entire Internet.

When I type stuff into forms at Google, I expect to hear back around a week later on those occassions when they actually get back to me, and I pay Google thousands of dollars to provide the service I'm asking about. One would hope I'm getting the good customer experience compared to some anonymous malware distributor saying they've reformed their ways.

(Less you think I'm joking: Google for [reinclusion request] to see what Google's suggested timeline is for reinclusion in their index if you are bounced out for SEO practices they don't approve of. Hint: think months, not minutes.]

In the amusing-to-contemplate-fantasy-world where there was any entity as powerful as Google on the Internet, and that entity blocked access to 60% of Google users for distributing malware (well, it is highly likely that Google is a contributing factor to more malware infections than anyone else on earth -- see "owns navigation on the Internet"), I highly doubt that Larry would ask Sergey to write something into a web form somewhere and then, you know, wait until somebody got around to addressing it.

jacquesm2• 17 years ago

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Adropbox.com&ie=utf...

shows 71 pages indexed

http://www.google.com/search?q=dropbox.com&ie=utf-8&...

has 1.7 million mentions

It works fine for me...

When you switch domains the history of the new domain is somewhat important and how you go about switching is pretty important too if you want to keep your google traffic.

patio113• 17 years ago

They appear to have done it right, though: 301 redirecting the old domain to the corresponding URLs on the new domain, which is the SEO best practice that Google tells you to do.

(I know there is a Firefox extension that would let you check this but since I am intensely lazy I opened up a terminal and telneted to www.getdropbox.com on port 80 then typed "GET www.getdropbox.com/" enter, which produced the expected result, a 301 redirect header and some human readable text for idiots like me who test things by telnet.)

jacquesm2• 17 years ago

What I don't get is what they mean with 'dropbox.com blocked by Google', I can't find any proof of that and the diagnostics page shows some history information which indicates that there is not and has not been a problem.

Does anybody have a screenshot of what it looks like with the 'problem' visible ?

albertni• 17 years ago

I don't understand how they can block a site this big and this heavily trafficked without even making an attempt to contact anyone.

chaosmachine• 17 years ago

Automation. They accidentally flagged the entire internet a while ago.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=459590

selvakn• 17 years ago

its fake.. Check this out http://safebrowsing.clients.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnost...

piers• 17 years ago

They've only blocked the secure site for that domain name. Might be because the SSL certificate is still for www.getdropbox.com

Dropbox.com blocked by Google?

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