Comment by grayhatter
3 months ago
> Marking a website as “unsafe” is an opinion.
No, it's not.
You're welcome to cite case law if you want to insist. Otherwise, unsafe (in the context of infosec) has a definition of likely or able to cause harm or malfunction. Something that is provable or falsifiable with evidence.
Whether that's true or not is irrelevant if it's defined by law differently. Even without case law and precedent you'd still have to test it in court, which for libel can be prohibitively expensive.
For clarity I'm not agreeing or disagreeing, but what means sense to the layperson (including experts in a particular field) is sometimes at odds with what the law says.
Isn't "oops we made a mistake" actually a valid defense to libel in most US states? I thought you had to prove it was intentional to some extent? Or reckless/negligent IANAL
Google takes no action to review the reports that their warnings are false until you sign up for Google products (namely - registering the site in their search console).
I reported a falsely flagged site repeatedly for weeks with absolutely no action from them.
Mozilla and Microsoft both did actually remove the warnings after the reports (Edge and Firefox stopped displaying the warning). Google did not. Google strong armed me into registering for google products, like a fucking bastard of a company.
This was the moment I went from "I don't love google anymore" to "Google can get fucked".
I wish them bankruptcy and every damn legal consequence that is possible to enforce.
I'm not defending google, I'm just wondering if claiming libel is barking up the wrong legal tree.
"I believed it to be true" is a defense. But negligence isn't. In fact, that is usually what you want to prove, that they acted on things that a reasonable person (or a person that is supposed to be skilled in that field) can see is not true.
Negligence is an element of the tort of defamation.
I'm curious as to how you would prove that it would be impossible for any resource accessible under a given DNS domain to ever cause harm to anyone else.
You don't. Google has to prove that something on that domain can cause harm.
I'm afraid that's not how it works in modern law in the U.S.:
"In addition to establishing that the defendant was aware of his statement's defamatory meaning, the plaintiff also must show that the defamatory statement is false. The falsity requirement has evolved gradually through a two-step process. Initially, the courts recognized that truth was a defense in a defamation suit. With time, however, the burden of proof on the issue of the statement's truth or falsity shifted to the plaintiff, so that now a statement is not actionable unless it can be proven false."
https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?params=/c... (pp. 851ff).
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