Azaroth

As you may or may not notice, when searching for my website using Google, a funny little warning appears.

“This site may harm your computer”, it says.

Initially, I was caught rather off guard. Oh my! I’ve got a secret alter ego, and he’s HAXING MY READERS!

That’s it. While I’m still conscious and thinking correctly, I must enact a plan to catch my personal Mr. Hyde in action… if I just fashion an airplane with these bits of string and this lawnmower I could just maybe..

Oh, nah. Wait, okay. Nevermind.

Yeah, turns out someone devised a way to inject spam code into Wordpress blogs.

I cleaned out the code and applied the necessary security patches, content that I wasn’t actually drinking bubbling green liquid and hacking everyone who reads this site at night time in a pair of ripped up cutoff shorts.

Then I waited. Surely they’ll remove this warning soon, right? I mean, it looks pretty bad. Not to mention you can’t actually go to my site from Google at ALL anymore. You can click the link, but it leads to an odd warning page instead of my website. From there, you have to copy and paste my URL. And this doesn’t just apply to the post in which the dastardly code was found. They’ve actually blacklisted my entire domain, and everything on it.

Reading their email a bit more closely, apparently I now have to go through some unexplained process that involves registering my website with them and requesting a review.

I was kind of taken aback. “Wait a second, here”, I thought to myself in my best Adam West. This doesn’t seem right.

If Google can crawl my site and determine that it’s unsafe, surely it can crawl and determine that it is. Doesn’t registering my website with them and requesting a review smack a bit of a protection racket? When do I have to start paying money for this review? Who is determining whether my site is fit to go back on the internet again? When do they start blacklisting sites that the government doesn’t like? Next thing you know, there’ll be a bunch of these companies working for the Chinese government and REALLY delving into the area of censorship! LOL! That’d be CRAZY!

Maybe there should be some kind of search option that enables random Google censorship of your internets? “Do you want us to prevent your access to sites we deem harmful?”, that kind of thing.

More on this adventure next week. Same Bat time, same Bat channel.

Well, not fucking likely. I don’t make money off of this website and I don’t give a shit whether anyone visits, so I’m not very likely to come along when they tug on my leash. Someone would pretty much be forced to do whatever they said if they ran a business on the internet, though. And that scares me a little.

Kiss my white, Irish Spring fresh ass, Google.