google

First of all let me repeat it:

THERE ISN’T OR EVER WAS ANY MALWARE ON THIS SITE.

It was with great confusion that today I realized google had marked this website as malicious, it took me a while because I had the Security features on Chrome disabled on my machine.

I quickly begun looking into what had happened, worrying I might had been hacked without realizing, but it quickly become clear what was going on.

A few days ago I had restored a download link UnSafeDiscX, scanning the file against virus total which Google owns and likely uses to judge if something is malware or not was  flagging unsafediscx as malware.

The truth is that the file in question isn’t malware, but a set of tools to bypass the old SafeDisc CD copy protection. Tools that I figured might still be useful to people trying to run safedisc games on modern Windows 10 which no longer supports the copy protection.

Some bad Anti Virus companies insist on incorrectly marking such tools as “generic malware” even though they’ve been around and used for over 15 years without problems. Regardless, I was left with no choice but to remove the link for the file from the front page and requested google to re examine my site in the hopes that it will be unblocked.

I’m saddened by this, big red warnings are scary and I’m sure a lot of people will now see bnetlauncher with suspicion, even though it had nothing to do with it and has it’s source code fully available. It’s also a sobering reminder of how much power Google has to simply remove a site from circulation, which somewhat leaves me worried for the future of the internet. 🙁