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If a newspaper publishes a false story about a business and someone takes it upon themselves to attack the business, it's partially the newspaper's fault.

by WhyNotHugo7 hours ago|

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If a newspaper publishes a story about a business and someone takes it upon themselves to attack the business, the attacker is at fault, regardless of the veracity of the newspapers claims.

by rtsam7 hours ago|

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I am in Canada, but I think it is the same in the US? A newspaper can be responsible here. For example, if they say "people should riot" and a riot happens, the newspaper could be responsible for all actions that resulted the same as if they were the ones doing the crime.

Same with if they become aware of defamation and fail to retract and make a statement. But newspapers will generally also thoroughly investigate themselves to make sure what they are publishing is true.

by otterley1 hours ago|

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It is not the same in the U.S. (And, to be honest, I'm quite doubtful this is true in Canada, though I could be persuaded through legal citations that it is.)

by account429 hours ago|

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It's both's fault. Google for making false and clearly damaging statements (libel) and Radix for acting on them.

by otterley9 hours ago|

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(IAAL but this is not legal advice.)

It’s not libel. Defamation requires a false statement of fact. Marking a website as “unsafe” is an opinion.

by rtsam8 hours ago|

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I always wonder what the settlement and damages would be if google marked Amazon as a phishing site for even a few minutes.

The problem is that these gatekeepers of the internet respond to false statements of facts/opinions by so called professionals.

I had cloudflare mark a worker as phishing because a AI "security company" thought my 301 redirect to their clients website was somehow malicious. (url redirects are normal affiliate things)

If the professionals don't understand the difference and cloudflare and google blindly block things, this is scary.

by otterley5 hours ago|

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There is a potentially different cause of action, tortious interference with business relationships. It does require that the defendant intended to interfere in a way that would cause harm to the plaintiff, though. Proving Google intended such harm would be difficult and expensive.

by pocksuppet1 hours ago|

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Google intends harm to everyone on that list. That's the point of the list. Google is unlikely to have intended this specific harm, but they don't have to.

by otterley1 hours ago|

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That won’t cut it in court.

by retired6 hours ago|

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Marking a website as "unsafe" in Chrome is equal to standing in front of the door of a small restaurant and blocking 71% of people going inside. Everyone first has to agree that they will enter the restaurant at their own risk.

That is more than an opinion. Chrome has a monopoly and should act accordingly. Blocking entry to a website should be a last resort, not just because someone didn't add their website to the whitelist.

by donmcronald2 hours ago|

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Yeah. Everyone uses their list and being blocked by all web browsers is like having someone cover the doorway with a massive DANGER sign. It's insane that people are roaming around here arguing that it's ok because the damage caused is a necessity for "internet scale".

by otterley2 hours ago|

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Right now, any damages are completely speculative at this point. I would suspect in this case, the damages are minimal, and taken in the broader context, the good outweighs the harm. Do you have evidence to the contrary?

by donmcronald19 minutes ago|

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The good outweighs the harm until it happens to you. The problem is that even if the failure rate is low, the failure can be catastrophic for the people suffering from it.

I use Ubiquiti as an example for an update they pushed to their UniFi systems a long time ago (5+ years). Some people were configuring their devices to use an https URL to connect to a management console when it was supposed to be http. Before the update, the console accepted http on the https port. After it didn't. That caused devices to disconnect from the management portal and remain offline.

When people complained, Ubiquiti said they realized it would happen, but it "would only affect a tiny percentage of customers." However, most customers that were affected had a 100% rate of failure. One person had something like 600-700 devices that got disconnected and required manual reconfiguration.

A 1% failure rate might be ok for the company, but it shouldn't be if the 1% of people affected suffer 100% failure. The distribution of the failures needs to be considered.

I had my primary domain that my entire family has used for 25 years put on that blacklist. If I hadn't been able to get it removed it would have had a massive negative impact on my life. Had it been suspended by the registry the way the OP of this article describes, I'm not sure how it would have worked out.

So it may be a false positive of .0000000001%, but would have ruined my life. I have 900 entries in my password manager and probably half of them are tied to that domain. Is my entire digital life acceptable collateral damage? Is yours?

by retired2 hours ago|

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Indeed. It is almost like how the Mafia operates. This person didn't submit his website to Google and now Google blocks visitors.

by ThunderSizzle8 hours ago|

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It's being stated as fact, not as an opinion.

by jolmg8 hours ago|

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(IANAL) It's not about how it's stated, but whether it can be objectively proven to be true or false. "unsafe" refers to the likelihood of something bad happening in the future. You can't prove that something bad will happen in the future, so it's opinion.

by saghm8 hours ago|

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Also not a lawyer, but that makes intuitive sense. If I say "that food tastes bad", it's phrased as a fact, but a "reasonable person" (which is in fact a legal test used for some things, although I admit I'm not sure about libel) knows that there's an implicit "...to me" qualifier because the concept of taste itself is inherently subjective. My instinct is that while there are some things everyone would agree on as unsafe, it pretty quickly turns into a judgment call, and it probably makes sense to allow even ill-informed opinions that are made in good faith rather than malice or negligence. The question then becomes whether there's sufficient evidence to conclude something like that, and while the bar is lower for a libel claim than something criminal, it's still not obvious this would be provable here.

by ryandrake7 hours ago|

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"Unsafe" is just a terribly vague word, too. As a layman, I wouldn't even know what that means with respect to a web site. What's "unsafe" about it? Is it going to shoot my dog? Is it going to drain my bank account? Is it going to give my computer a virus? Saying a web site is "unsafe" really isn't providing any interesting information, and it shouldn't be acted upon by pretty much anyone.

by otterley5 hours ago|

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I agree that it’s not specific, but I disagree that it should be blindly ignored. It’s not like they have no reason whatsoever for their opinion.

by jmye8 hours ago|

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This seems like a distinction without difference, given everyone in the ecosystem takes that "opinion" as true fact, including the market-leading browser produced by the "opinion"-haver.

I get that's mostly what corporate lawyers argue about, but it's functionally dishonest in this case.

by 8 hours ago|

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