The following ticket comes in:
The warning message that my web site might be an attack site is showing up again. … The fact that I can get around the warning and get to the site doesn't alter the fact that it comes up sometimes instead of my home page. Business is bad enough without having customers scared away. It wasn't there yesterday. It is there again today.
This, and the phone conversation, lead me to believe that when he opens his browser, it immediately loads up the Google home page [1], and that he types his domain into the search box to get to his own site.
I say that because when I went to Google, and typed in his domain:
XXXX XXXXXX
This site may harm your computer. > Merchants, if you are interested in selling your wares in this market, call XXXXXXXXXXXX between 9-5 EST, Mon-Fri for information … > XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX - Similar
That, and I doubt he really understands how all this Intarweb stuff works, because that only happened on one of his three browsers.
Heck, for all I know, it could be the anti-virus software on the one computer gets some clues from Google (I'm not even sure how all this stuff works anymore, especially on the Microsoft Windows front).
Of course, his site uses quite a large amount of PHP … which meant I had to clean out the malicious PHP code that had been added …
I'm really of two minds about PHP. Personally, I hate the language (being designed by rabid wombats will do that for a language) and if I have a choice, I'd rather use C to write web applications than PHP (or maybe Lua [2]). But I'll admit up front I'm a computer language snob who prefers early binding and static typing (comes from my Assembly Language background I'm sure), because PHP has allowed people who would otherwise be unable to create web applications not only the ability to create web applications, but find inexpensive hosting for said applications. Then again, it has allowed people who should otherwise be prevented from creating web applications the ability to create web applications more insecure than a balsa wood [3] bank vault.
I think I'm digressing (and there's more I could say about insecure web applications, but that's for another post), but I'm not sure what point I want to make, but I think it has something to do with Google taking over the Internet [4]. That, and the fact that because of the way they scale, they attempt to automate as much of the company as possible, and as a consequence, they have horrible customer service [5] (and no, the irony of using Google to search for evidence of its own bad customer service isn't lost on me, nor the fact that I'm probably using the term “irony” incorrectly), so our customer will probably face an uphill battle to get “This site may harm your computer” off his Google search results.
[3] http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-balsa-wood.htm
[4] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/13/arbor_networks_internet_traffic_study_09/
[5] http://www.google.com/search?q=google+customer+service+sucks