Google problems?
 

Anyone else having Google problems? I've had messages all day asking for non-spam ID (what do you call the boxes where you type the funky letters so they know you're a human?) and just got an email from our IT area telling us not to use Google, which they claim is urging download of spyware and virus check programs.

I wonder what's up? :hmm:

Your IT department is a bunch of idiots.

"Urging download of spyware" ?

And that spam warning usually occurs when you've got lots of users running through the proxy and appearing as the same IP or requesting very quickly in succession. Do you have a proxy server? You can change localization (we have proxy-us, proxy-uk, etc) or you can wait for the traffic to subside.

And what you call that "mangled text are you a human" thing is a CAPTCHA.

Completely
Automated
Public
Turing test for telling
Computers and
Humans
Apart.

CAPTCHA. No kidding.

Yeah, okay. Thanks, ratbastid. CAPTCHA!

Thanks, JinnKai. I wish I could tell them you said that. They're not too bright.

This is what Google shows:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v3...3/untitled.jpg

Here's the email they sent us:

"We are currently experiencing a problem with access to the Google search engine from (place of employment) computers.

Please “Do Not” choose the virus checker or spyware remover options as advised by Google.

Until further notice, please use the below alternate search engines:
www.yahoo.com
www.msn.com

If you need further assistance, please call the ETS Customer Care Technology Service Desk at xxxxxxxzxxx.

google has been pissing me off lately with flat out denying the ability to click on some websites because "oh noes, it might be a virus"

theres not even a link to be like "thanks for the warning now let me look at the goddamn site"

You left the company in at the end, you can edit it out if you want.

And yea, that's the error I was anticipating. Those Google sensors kick in when really rapid searching or multiple simultaneous searches from the same IP are occuring - a DDOS sensor, basically.

You can cause it to happen on any connection by opening a dozen or so Google windows and searching simultaneously, or by writing a script that hits the query page a couple times a second.

It'll subside as traffic to the site does, which is why is probably why IT is trying to steer employees away from it.

Nah, that's the internal department name, believe it or not.

You'd figure with a name like that, someone would know what they're doing. Sheesh.

I think they know what they are doing.

Of course, it's entirely possible that one of the computers on your company network is running a zombie process that is attacking Google. Hope your IT folks are checking into that.

(I used to see that problem a lot when I was trying to solve some email problems at my old company - it was hard to phrase the question in the right way to get past that message.)

You've obviously never dealt with the majority of corporate "IT" types.

They get their MCSE and then pretend, for upwards of 10 years, to know what the hell they're doing while the engineers complain about their idiocy.

That's not even including the ones who intentionally create problems to keep themselves busy, or to piss off people they don't like.

Never have problems with The Big G. Damn near only search engine I use.

@ All About Music
For sure those IT pricks dick around with other people's shit. Back in the college dorms where an IT branch was located for the school-provided laptops. They would sit down there and hack the laptops that people didn't keep updated. Assholes.

http://quotation-marks.blogspot.com/

Seems all the productive points have been covered :p

That is an "awesome" blog. I wish; that people would, learn-to-use punctuation correctly:

When the hell did quotation marks become a means of adding emphasis on words?

when html or bbcode for bold wasn't an option.

This is going to be a thread hijack again, obviously... but I tend to punctuate the way I speak, with pauses in the same places etc. I wonder if that makes my use of punctuation incorrect, or if perhaps I naturally speak the way I type.

Isn't that why we put / around the words... Like this: I am /so/ friggin' sick of people putting quotations marks where they don't belong!

So? We have the moderators to split forums whenever they feel like it. They can throw this part in the nonsense bin.

Same here. They really need to include sarcastic tags though. [sarcasm]Thing is, who'd use them? Who uses sarcasm these days, honestly?[/sarcasm]

so a reason google pisses me off is, for example

if I type reason freaks

which should pull up reasonfreaks.com

I get that damned "omg it's not safe" warning.

and I have to type it in manually, they don't even do me the service of giving me a "click to disregard this warning" link or anything.

Yeah that is bullshit... but I rarely if ever encounter it, let alone ignore it.

How many sites do you go to where you see that warning? Hmmmm? :orly: /kidding/

eh, not that many but it's still enough to annoy me. Google doesn't need to play the role of net nanny, they need to be a search engine and let me infect my computer with viruses and porn if thats what I wanna do.

As a side note, Google almost never has issues with their servers. They're very reliable. If you're having trouble connecting and wondering if it's them or you, it's almost certainly you.

I've never come across this situation until you gave this example. That said, they do give you the text of the URL to copy and paste, so you don't have to type it out manually. (Still not as easy as just clicking, but it's something.)

My suspicion is they intentionally do it this way in an attempt to force users to actually stop and read the message. Why they feel the need to have warnings at all, I still don't understand. Maybe they got a lot of complaints?

Presumably to help stem the tide of those nasty web worms that were going around via MSN etc

That would make a lot of sense.

I'll try my best to contain my surprise. This is my I-care face: :expressionless:


There ought to just be a button at the bottom of Google's message that will copy the link to the clipboard, save me the extra movement of my finger across the touch pad, because I am that lazy.

Well, fair enough, but it's pretty conceivable that some virus writer one day manages to put up a page which appears at the top of some searches. It's useful for Google to warn you that clicking on a link may damage your computer... even if I know better than to click on a link, I know lots of people who wouldn't think twice otherwise.