Dear Linux Magazine Reader,

Sometimes you get a reminder of something you already know, and you have to stop and say, "Ah, yes, that's right, I'm awake." Several news sources ran a story recently on Google's Safe Browsing technology, which "scan websites for potential risks to warn users before they visit unsafe sites." Safe browsing is now integrated into the Chrome and Firefox browsers, which means users get a warning about sites with potentially unsafe content. Google's Transparency Report site provides a public face for the Safe Browsing project, with information and statistics on malware detection and prevention. The Site Status page at the Transparency Report site has a search feature that lets you enter a website's URL and gives you back a rating for how safe the site is.

Now here's where it gets interesting: Several users discovered if they entered Google's own Google.com domain in the search field on the Site Status page, the status for the site came back as "partially dangerous." The world grew suddenly concerned that an act as frequent and fundamental as a Google search would be called "partially dangerous." But when you consider the nature of web spiders, the industrious little bots that crawl the web and index websites, it isn't surprising that the index could end up with an occasional malicious site. Sometimes good sites link to bad sites, and a spider diligently traveling those links will end up in some sketchy places.

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