Started this morning. All of my personal tools like nextcloud and RSS reader were blocked, and I had to go manually override that screen for each one. Unacceptable.

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[–] 162 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Looks like Google is the responsible one, not Firefox. Don't shoot the messenger.

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  • [–] 16 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    Why does Firefox need to tell Google which sites you're visiting even if you don't use Google Search ?

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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Are they submitting that to Google or are they subscribing to some hashed list google has of domains with (according to them) know malware, issues, etc?

    In that case everything happens on your pc and doesn’t go to google or Mozilla

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  • [–] 16 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Hashed, but there is also a preferences cookie.

    Copied from Wikipedia, but the citation is Google's white paper on this 'Logs, which include an IP address and one or more cookies, are kept for two weeks and are tied to the other Safe Browsing requests made from the same device.'

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  • [–] 58 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Set up google search console for that domain, then it will tell you why it’s blocked. It might be a false positive you can flag, or it might be that a host or service has been compromised or contains something harmful. Google’s blocklist is quite aggressive and often blocks entire domains if one of their subdomains has a violation.

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  • [–] 45 points 2 years ago

    Yeah, people are getting really upset at Google/Mozilla here but SafeBrowsing is actually a very good service. I legitimately believe that it frequently prevents malware infections and phishing on a regular basis. It is also architected with a privacy-first approach that reveals very little data to Google. And the SafeBrowsing privacy policy is actually one of Google's very tight ones.

    I think Mozilla made the right choice to enable it by default. They also make it fairly easy to disable this for advanced users under the "Deceptive Content and Dangerous Software Protection" setting. (No need to crack open about:config, disabling it is fully supported.)

    I understand that this may be a controversial opinion.

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  • [–] 54 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    You can just disable Google Safe Browsing in the settings.

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  • [–] 41 points 2 years ago

    google owns the internet

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  • [–] 31 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Are you using a free subdomain?

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    I am and have this issue sometimes. What’s the connection / cause?

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  • [–] 26 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Reports of individual subdomains that are running shit lead to the main site slowly being pushed to "generally non-safe".

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    This is a crtified .zip moment

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (1 child)
  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (3 children)
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  • [–] 15 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Anyone also using that free subdomain is linked to you because you're both using the same domain

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Ahhh, that makes sense. Thanks.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago*

    You're welcome.

    Think of it as you sharing a house with other people. You all have your own rooms (subdomains) but live at the same address (domain). You try to order a takeaway but they've blacklisted your address because another resident abused their service

    (Analogy for anyone else who comes across this)

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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I imagine that domain is mostly used for spam/phishing sites so Google preemptively blocks all sub domains until they prove they aren't spam. That's one of the shortcomings of using a free domain I guess.

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  • [+] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)
  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    I got 1 dollar a year on my domain, gen.xyz has some real cheap domains if you don't care about it being a string of 6-9 numbers.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago

    Just get a cheap domain. Free domain will always get flagged, unless it's for a service with no development API. It's too easy as an attack vector, so those free domains often get flagged. If you want to avoid it all together, just get a cheap domain you own and control.

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  • [–] 30 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I got hit by that, basically forced me to make a Google account and add all my sites to it even though I couldn't care less about SEO and indexing. Now it keeps sending me spam emails about "problems" with my websites. No, I'm intentionally not letting you index this.

    What seems to be going on is it's flagging random widespread open-source software as impersonation/phishing login page because it's seen it on a bigger site and assumes you're doing some phishing.

    Filed an appeal and it thankfully promptly got resolved. Google ain't known to be friendly to developers.

    I want to like that feature because I'm sure it's helpful for the less technically savvy. But I hate that Google can just decide my site is unsafe and essentially cut my sites off the Internet for most people. If Google denies your appeal you have basically zero recourse.

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  • [–] 25 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    I think we need more info here. I'm guessing this is a locally hosted site? How are you exposing it to the web? DDNS? Reverse proxy? Honestly it's hard to diagnose without knowing your IP, which you definitely shouldn't give us.

    Edit: you can check your site here, maybe they'll give you details on why it was blacklisted: https://transparencyreport.google.com/safe-browsing/search

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 2 years ago

    Just reporting back that the transparencyreport page just says "some pages on this site are unsafe" without elaboration. It then offers that if I want details I have to give it individual page links at a time to see if they're the cause of the alert... Ugh.

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  • [–] 19 points 2 years ago

    Happend to me recently, with no option to "ignore and continue". I opened the page in private mode and it worked. Weird.

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  • [–] 15 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    If you have a dynamic IP from your ISP, could be you got unlucky and were given a address previously used by attackers.

    Or if you have a static IP on a VPS or similar, they may have had a lot of attacks from the IP Range.

    By attacks in this instance I mean people setting up phishing or similar websites as the most common example. A simple web form, probably with obfuscated code. They then send a bunch of emails line "click here to view your invoice"and gather office 365 credentials.

    While it's not good that this kind of false positive happens from time to time, I am more thankful this kind of service exists. Yes, there's privacy and security implications, but smart screen has stopped legitimate attacks at our clients before, and we force it enabled wherever possible.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    I think people are missing the point here if they say "just click through". Mozilla's reliance on Google could potentially be anticompetitive in nature if Google is essentially worsening a self hosted service which would compete with their own offerings.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago*

    Click “ignore the risk” and it will continue to the page. You better be certain you aren’t being man in the middle attacked though.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)

    That's weird. Google is using Safe Browsing to censor the Internet.

    You can go to about:config and set browser.safebrowsing.blockedURIs.enabled to false.

    It will be better if Mozilla make their own version of Google Safe Browsing. Because less Google is good.

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  • [+] 0 points 2 years ago