Google flags Immich sites as dangerous

438 pointsposted 8 hours ago
by janpio

142 Comments

arccy

5 hours ago

If you're going to host user content on subdomains, then you should probably have your site on the Public Suffix List https://publicsuffix.org/list/ . That should eventually make its way into various services so they know that a tainted subdomain doesn't taint the entire site....

0xbadcafebee

3 hours ago

  In the past, browsers used an algorithm which only denied setting wide-ranging cookies for top-level domains with no dots (e.g. com or org). However, this did not work for top-level domains where only third-level registrations are allowed (e.g. co.uk). In these cases, websites could set a cookie for .co.uk which would be passed onto every website registered under co.uk.

  Since there was and remains no algorithmic method of finding the highest level at which a domain may be registered for a particular top-level domain (the policies differ with each registry), the only method is to create a list. This is the aim of the Public Suffix List.
  
  (https://publicsuffix.org/learn/)
So, once they realized web browsers are all inherently flawed, their solution was to maintain a static list of websites.

God I hate the web. The engineering equivalent of a car made of duct tape.

modeless

13 minutes ago

Show me a platform not made out of duct tape and I'll show you a platform nobody uses.

lukan

2 hours ago

"The engineering equivalent of a car made of duct tape"

Kind of. But do you have a better proposition?

gmueckl

2 hours ago

A part of the issue is IMO that browsers have become ridiculously bloated everything-programs. You could take about 90% of that out and into dedicated tools and end up with something vastly saner and safer and not a lot less capable for all practical purposes. Instead, we collectively are OK with frosting this atrocious layer cake that is today's web with multiple flavors of security measures of sometimes questionable utility.

End of random rant.

nemothekid

2 hours ago

>A part of the issue is IMO that browsers have become ridiculously bloated everything-programs.

I don't see how that solves the issue that PSL tries to fix. I was a script kiddy hosting neopets phishing pages on free cpanel servers from <random>.ripway.com back in 2007. Browsers were way less capable then.

lukan

2 hours ago

PSL and the way cookies work is just part of the mess. A new approach could solve that in a different way, taking into account all the experience we had with scriptkiddies and professional scammers and pishers since then. But I also don't really have an idea where and how to start.

shadowgovt

an hour ago

And of course, if the new solution completely invalidates old sites, it just won't get picked up. People prefer slightly broken but accessible to better designed but inaccessible.

Kim_Bruning

31 minutes ago

Are you saying we should make a <Unix Equivalent Of A Browser?> A large set of really simple tools that each do one thing really really really pedantically well?

This might be what's needed to break out of the current local optimum.

lukan

2 hours ago

"You could take about 90% of that out and into dedicated tools "

But then you would loose plattform independency, the main selling point of this atrocity.

Having all those APIs in a sandbox that mostly just work on billion devices is pretty powerful and a potential succesor to HTML would have to beat that, to be adopted.

The best thing to happen, that I can see, is that a sane subset crystalizes, that people start to use dominantly, with the rest becoming legacy, only maintained to have it still working.

But I do dream of a fresh rewrite of the web since university (and the web was way slimmer back then), but I got a bit more pragmatic and I think I understood now the massive problem of solving trusted human communication better. It ain't easy in the real world.

gmueckl

an hour ago

But do we need e.g serial port or raw USB access straight from a random website? Even WebRTC is a bit of a stretch. There is a lot of cruft in modern browsers that does little except increase attack surface.

This all just drives a need to come up with ever more tacked-on protection schemes because browsers have big targets painted on them.

com2kid

33 minutes ago

Itch.io games and controller support.

You have sites now that let you debug microcontrollers on your browser, super cool.

Same thing but with firmware updates in the browser. Cross platform, replaced a mess of ugly broken vendor tools.

lukan

an hour ago

WebRTC I use since many years and would miss it a lot. P2P is awesome.

WebUSB I don't use or would miss it right now, but .. the main potential use case is security and it sounds somewhat reasonable

"Use in multi-factor authentication

WebUSB in combination with special purpose devices and public identification registries can be used as key piece in an infrastructure scale solution to digital identity on the internet."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebUSB

shadowgovt

an hour ago

How else am I going to make a game in the browser that be controlled with a controller?

ngold

an hour ago

Not sure if it counts but I've been enjoying librewolf. I believe just a stripped down firefox.

smaudet

an hour ago

> Having all those APIs in a sandbox that mostly just work on billion devices is pretty powerful and a potential succesor to HTML would have to beat that, to be adopted.

I think the giant major downside, is that they've written a rootkit that runs on everything, and to try to make up for that they want to make it so only sites they allow can run.

It's not really very powerful at all if nobody can use it, at that point you are better off just not bothering with it at all.

The Internet may remain, but the Web may really be dead.

lukan

an hour ago

"It's not really very powerful at all if nobody can use it"

But people do use it, like the both of us right now?

People also use maps, do online banking, play games, start complex interactive learning environments, collaborate in real time on documents etc.

All of that works right now.

sefrost

2 hours ago

You are right from a technical point, I think, but in reality - how would one begin to make that change?

CaptainOfCoit

3 hours ago

I think it's somewhat tribal webdev knowledge that if you host user generated content you need to be on the PSL otherwise you'll eventually end up where Immich is now.

I'm not sure how people not already having hit this very issue before is supposed to know about it beforehand though, one of those things that you don't really come across until you're hit by it.

no_wizard

3 hours ago

I’ve been doing this for at least 15 years and it’s the first I heard of this.

Fun learning new things so often but I never once heard of the public suffix list.

That said, I do know the other best practices mentioned elsewhere

foobarian

2 hours ago

First rule of the public suffix list...

tonyhart7

3 hours ago

so its skill issue ??? or just google being bad????

yndoendo

2 hours ago

I will go with Google being bad / evil for 500.

Google 90s to 2010 is nothings like Google 2025. There is a reason they removed "Don't be evil" ... being evil and authoritarian makes more money.

Looking at you Manifest V2 ... pour one out for your homies.

shadowgovt

an hour ago

Sympathy for the devil, people keep using Google's browser because the safe search guards catch more bad actors than they false positive good actors.

tonyhart7

an hour ago

downvoted for saying truth

many google employee is in here, so I dont expect them to be agree with you

thayne

2 hours ago

Looking through some of the links in this post, I there are actually two separate issues here:

1. Immich hosts user content on their domain. And should thus be on the public suffic list.

2. When users host an open source self hosted project like immich, jellyfin, etc. on their own domain it gets flagged as phishing because it looks an awful lot like the publicly hosted version, but it's on a different domain, and possibly a domain that might look suspicious to someone unfamiliar with the project, because it includes the name of the software in the domain. Something like immich.example.com.

The first one is fairly straightforward to deal with, if you know about the public suffix list. I don't know of a good solution for the second though.

smaudet

an hour ago

I don't think the Internet should be run by being on special lists (other than like, a globally run registry of domain names)...

I get that SPAM, etc., are an issue, but, like f* google-chrome, I want to browse the web, not some carefully curated list of sites some giant tech company has chosen.

A) you shouldn't be using google-chrome at all B) Firefox should definitely not be using that list either C) if you are going to have a "safe sites" list, that should definitely be a non-profit running that, not an automated robot working for a large probably-evil company...

thayne

an hour ago

Firefox and Safari also use the list. At least by default, I think you can turn it off in firefox. And on the whole, I think it is valuable to have _a_ list of known-unsafe sites. And note that Safe Browsing is a blocklist, not an allowlist.

The problem is that at least some of the people maintaining this list seem to be a little trigger happy. And I definitely thing Google probably isn't the best custodian of such a list, as they have obvious conflicts of interest.

jonas21

an hour ago

You can turn it off in Chrome settings if you want.

awesome_dude

22 minutes ago

Oh god, you reminded me the horrors of hosting my own mailserver and all of the white/blacklist BS you have to worry about being a small operator (it's SUPER easy to end up on the blacklists, and is SUPER hard to get onto whitelists)

knowriju

an hour ago

If you have such strong feelings, you could always use vanilla chromium.

shadowgovt

an hour ago

There are other browsers if you want to browse the web with the blinders off.

It's browser beware when you do, but you can do it.

VTimofeenko

an hour ago

> When users host an open source self hosted project like immich, jellyfin, etc. on their own domain...

I was just deploying your_spotify and gave it your-spotify.<my services domain> and there was a warning in the logs that talked about thud, linking the issue:

https://github.com/Yooooomi/your_spotify/issues/271

liqilin1567

36 minutes ago

That means the Safe Browsing abuse could be weaponized against self-hosted services, oh my...

sschueller

15 minutes ago

New directive from the Whitehouse. Block all non approved sites. If you don't do it we will block your merger etc...

david_van_loon

2 hours ago

The issue isn't the user-hosted content - I'm running a release build of Immich on my own server and Google flagged my entire domain.

827a

3 hours ago

They aren't hosting user content; it was their pull request preview domains that was triggering it.

This is very clearly just bad code from Google.

aftbit

3 hours ago

I thought this story would be about some malicious PR that convinced their CI to build a page featuring phishing, malware, porn, etc. It looks like Google is simply flagging their legit, self-created Preview builds as being phishing, and banning the entire domain. Getting immich.cloud on the PSL is probably the right thing to do for other reasons, and may decrease the blast radius here.

LennyHenrysNuts

3 hours ago

The root cause is bad behaviour by google. This is merely a workaround.

bitpush

3 hours ago

Remember, this is a free service that Google is offering for even their competitors to use.

And it is incredibly valuable thing. You might not think it is, but internet is filled utterly dangerous, scammy, phisy, malwary websites and everyday Safe Browsing (via Chrome, Firefox and Safari - yes, Safari uses Safe Browsing) keeps users safe.

If immich didnt follow best practice that's Google's fault? You're showing your naivety, and bias here.

NetMageSCW

3 hours ago

Please point me to where GoDaddy or any other hosting site mentions public suffix, or where Apple or Google or Mozilla have a listing hosting best practices that include avoiding false positives by Safe Browsing…

gruez

2 hours ago

>GoDaddy or any other hosting site mentions public suffix

They don't need to mention it because they handle it on behalf of the client. Them recommending best practices like using separate domains makes as much sense as them recommending what TLS configs to use.

>or where Apple or Google or Mozilla have a listing hosting best practices that include avoiding false positives by Safe Browsing…

Since were those sites the go to place to learn how to host a site? Apple doesn't offer anything related to web hosting besides "a computer that can run nginx". Google might be the place to ask if you were your aunt and "google" means "internet" to her. Mozilla is the most plausible one because they host MDN, but hosting documentation on HTML/CSS/JS doesn't necessarily mean they offer hosting advice, any more than expecting docs.djangoproject.com to contain hosting advice.

Zak

2 hours ago

The underlying question is how are people supposed to know about this before they have a big problem?

nemothekid

2 hours ago

If you have a service where anyone can sign up and host content on your subdomain, it really is your responsibility to know. Calling this "unfair" because you didn't know is naive.

If amazon shutdown your AWS account, because those same scammers used those domains to host CP rather than phishing pages, would you accept the excuse of "how was I supposed to know?"

liquid_thyme

3 hours ago

>You might not think it is, but internet is filled utterly dangerous, scammy, phisy, malwary websites

Google is happy to take their money and show scammy ads. Google ads are the most common vector for fake software support scams. Most people google something like "microsoft support" and end up there. Has Google ever banned their own ad domains?

Google is the last entity I would trust to be neutral here.

delis-thumbs-7e

3 hours ago

Oh c’mon. Google does not offer free services. Everyone should know that by now.

o11c

4 hours ago

Is that actually relevant when only images are user content?

Normally I see the PSL in context of e.g. cookies or user-supplied forms.

dspillett

3 hours ago

> Is that actually relevant when only images are user content?

Yes. For instance in circumstances exactly as described in the thread you are commenting in now and the article it refers to.

Services like google's bad site warning system may use it to indicate that it shouldn't consider a whole domain harmful if it considers a small number of its subdomains to be so, where otherwise they would. It is no guarantee, of course.

thayne

an hour ago

Well, using the public suffix list _also_ isolates cookies and treats the subdomains as different sites, which may or may not be desirable.

For example, if users are supposed to log in on the base account in order to access content on the subdomains, then using the public suffix list would be problematic.

ggm

3 hours ago

I think this only is true if you host independent entities. If you simply construct deep names about yourself with demonstrable chain of authority back, I don't think the PSL wants to know. Otherwise there is no hierarchy the dots are just convenience strings and it's a flat namespace the size of the PSLs length.

fukka42

3 hours ago

This is not about user content, but about their own preview environments! Google decided their preview environments were impersonating... Something? And decided to block the entire domain.

andrewstuart2

4 hours ago

Aw. I saw Jothan Frakes and briefly thought my favorite Starfleet first officer's actor had gotten into writing software later in life.

NelsonMinar

5 hours ago

Be sure to see the team's whole list of Cursed Knowledge. https://immich.app/cursed-knowledge

nemothekid

an hour ago

Some of these seem less cursed, and more just security design?

>Some phones will silently strip GPS data from images when apps without location permission try to access them.

That strikes me as the right thing to do?

gausswho

an hour ago

Huh. Maybe? I don't want that information available to apps to spy on me. But I do want full file contents available to some of them.

And wait. Uh oh. Does this mean my Syncthing-Fork app (which itself would never strike me as needing location services) might have my phone's images' location be stripped before making their way to my backup system?

EDIT: To answer my last question: My images transferred via Syncthing-Fork on a GrapheneOS device to another PC running Fedora Atomic have persisted the GPS data as verified by exiftool. Location permissions have not been granted to Syncthing-Fork.

Happy I didn't lose that data. But it would appear that permission to your photo files may expose your GPS locations regardless of the location permission.

serial_dev

an hour ago

I think the “cursed” part (from the developers point of view) is that some phones do that, some don’t, and if you don’t have both kinds available during testing, you might miss something?

_ZeD_

an hour ago

How does it makes sense?

eco

an hour ago

This kind of makes we wish CURSED.md was a standard file in projects. So much hard-earned knowledge could be shared.

levkk

5 hours ago

The Postgres query parameters one is funny. 65k parameters is not enough for you?!

strken

4 hours ago

As it says, bulk inserts with large datasets can fail. Inserting a few thousand rows into a table with 30 columns will hit the limit. You might run into this if you were synchronising data between systems or running big batch jobs.

Sqlite used to have a limit of 999 query parameters, which was much easier to hit. It's now a roomy 32k.

tym0

4 hours ago

Right, for postgres I would use unnest for inserting a non-static amount of rows.

strken

2 hours ago

In the past I've used batches of data, inserted into a separate table with all the constraints turned off and using UNNEST, and then inserted into the final table once it was done. We ended up both batching the data and using UNNEST because it was faster but it still let us resume midway through.

We probably should have been partitioning the data instead of inserting it twice, but I never got around to fixing that.

COPY is likely a better option if you have access to the host, or provider-specific extensions like aws_s3 if you have those. I'm sure a data engineer would be able to suggest a better ETL architecture than "shove everything into postgres", too.

reliabilityguy

3 hours ago

> PostgreSQL USER is cursed > The USER keyword in PostgreSQL is cursed because you can select from it like a table, which leads to confusion if you have a table name user as well.

is even funnier :D

jdsully

3 hours ago

The one thing I never understood about these warnings is how they don't run afoul of libel laws. They are directly calling you a scammer and "attacker". The same for Microsoft with their unknown executables.

They used to be more generic saying "We don't know if its safe" but now they are quite assertive at stating you are indeed an attacker.

crazygringo

2 hours ago

> They are directly calling you a scammer and "attacker".

No they're not. The word "scammer" does not appear. They're saying attackers on the site and they use the word "might".

This includes third-party hackers who have compromised the site.

They never say the owner of the site is the attacker.

I'm quite sure their lawyers have vetted the language very carefully.

pasteldream

2 hours ago

> The one thing I never understood about these warnings is how they don't run afoul of libel laws.

I’m not a lawyer, but this hasn’t ever been taken to court, has it? It might qualify as libel.

altairprime

an hour ago

I know of no such cases, and would love to know if someone finds one.

modzu

14 minutes ago

you only sue somebody poorer than you

kevinsundar

6 hours ago

This may not be a huge issue depending on mitigating controls but are they saying that anyone can submit a PR (containing anything) to Immich, tag the pr with `preview` and have the contents of that PR hosted on https://pr-<num>.preview.internal.immich.cloud?

Doesn't that effectively let anyone host anything there?

daemonologist

5 hours ago

I think only collaborators can add labels on github, so not quite. Does seem a bit hazardous though (you could submit a legit PR, get the label, and then commit whatever you want?).

ajross

4 hours ago

Exposure also extends not just to the owner of the PR but anyone with write access to the branch from which it was submitted. GitHub pushes are ssh-authenticated and often automated in many workflows.

warkdarrior

5 hours ago

Excellent idea for cost-free phishing.

heavyset_go

3 hours ago

Insane that one company can dictate what websites you're allowed to visit. Telling you what apps you can run wasn't far enough.

mmmpetrichor

38 minutes ago

US congress not functioning for over a decade causes a few problems.

liquid_thyme

3 hours ago

I really don't know how they got nerds to think scummy advertising is cool. If you think about it, the thing they make money on - no user actually wants ads or wants to see them, ever. Somehow Google has some sort of nerd cult that people think its cool to join such an unethical company.

jrowen

15 minutes ago

So unethical that they made countless free services that millions of people have relied on every day for years. Do you interface with anyone that's not deep in the software industry? Every regular person I know uses everything Google without any hesitation and no more than a bit of annoyance with ads sometimes. I think they all are pretty happy with the deal and would not switch to a paid ad-free version.

I'm increasingly blown away by takes on here that are just so dramatic and militant about things that barely even register to most people.

jazzyjackson

2 hours ago

Turns out it's cool to make lots of money

chrneu

2 hours ago

unfortunately nobody wants to sacrifice anything nowadays so everyone will keep using google, and microsoft, and tiktok and meta and blah blah

fHr

2 hours ago

Absolutely fuck Google

zackify

43 minutes ago

The open internet is done. Monopolies control everything.

We have an iOS app in the store for 3 years and out of the blue apple is demanding we provide new licenses that don’t exist and threaten to kick our app out. Nothing changed in 3 years.

Getting sick of these companies able to have this level of control over everything, you can’t even self host anymore apparently.

srik

24 minutes ago

> We have an iOS app in the store for 3 years and out of the blue apple is demanding we provide new licenses that don’t exist and threaten to kick our app out.

Crazy! If you can elaborate here, please do.

trollbridge

5 hours ago

A friend / client of mine used some kind of WordPress type of hosting service with a simple redirect. The host got on the bad sites list.

This also polluted their own domain, even when the redirect was removed, and had the odd side effect that Google would no longer accept email from them. We requested a review and passed it, but the email blacklist appears to be permanent. (I already checked and there are no spam problems with the domain.)

We registered a new domain. Google’s behaviour here incidentally just incentivises bulk registering throwaway domains, which doesn’t make anything any better.

donmcronald

5 hours ago

Wow. That scares me. I've been using my own domain that got (wrongly) blacklisted this week for 25 years and can't imagine having email impacted.

aetherspawn

an hour ago

A good takeaway is to separate different domains for different purposes.

I had prior been tossing up the pros/cons of this (such as teaching the user to accept millions of arbitrary TLDs as official), but I think this article (and other considerations) have solidified it for me.

For example

www.contoso.com (public)

www.contoso.blog (public with user comments)

contoso.net (internal)

staging.contoso.dev (dev/zero trust endpoints)

raging-lemur-a012afb4.contoso.build (snapshots)

sureglymop

9 minutes ago

The biggest con of this is that to a user it will seem much more like phishing.

It happened to me a while ago that I suddenly got emails from "githubnext.com". Well, I know Github and I know that it's hosted at "github.com". So, to me, that was quite obviously phishing/spam.

Turns out it was real...

david_van_loon

2 hours ago

I'm fighting this right now on my own domain. Google marked my family Immich instance as dangerous, essentially blocking access from Chrome to all services hosted on the same domain.

I know that I can bypass the warning, but the photo album I sent to my mother-in-law is now effectively inaccessible.

stack_framer

an hour ago

This happened to one of our documentation sites. My co-workers all saw it before I did, because Brave (my daily driver) wasn't showing it. I'm not sure if Brave is more relaxed in determining when a site is "dangerous" but I was glad not to be seeing it, because it was a false positive.

akshayKMR

an hour ago

Maybe a dumb question but what constitutes user-hosted-content?

Is a notion page, github repo, or google doc that has user submitted content that can be publicly shared also user-hosted?

IMO Google should not be able to use definitive language "Dangerous website" if its automated process is not definitive/accurate. A false flag can erode customer trust.

akerl_

4 hours ago

Tangential to the flagging issue, but is there any documentation on how Immich is doing the PR site generation feature? That seems pretty cool, and I'd be curious to learn more.

kyrofa

2 hours ago

Pretty sure Immich is on github, so I assume they have a workflow for it, but in case you're interested in this concept in general, gitlab has first-class support for this which I've been using for years: https://docs.gitlab.com/ci/review_apps/ . Very cool and handy stuff.

akersten

an hour ago

This is #1 on HN for a while now and I suspect it's because many of us are nervous about it happening to us (or have already had our own homelab domains flagged!).

So is there someone from Google around who can send this along to the right team to ensure whatever heuristic has gone wrong here is fixed for good?

goda90

14 minutes ago

I doubt Google the corporation cares one bit, and any individual employees who do care would likely struggle against the system to cause significant change.

The best we all can do is to stop using Google products and encourage our friends and family to do likewise. Make sure in our own work that we don't force others to rely on Google either.

stephenlf

39 minutes ago

I have no idea what immich is or what this post says, but I LOVE that this company has a collection of posts called, “Cursed Knowledge.”

captnasia

6 hours ago

This seems related to another hosting site that got caught out by this recently:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45538760

o11c

4 hours ago

Not quite the same (other than being an abuse of the same monopoly) since this one is explicitly pointing to first-party content, not user content.

Animats

5 hours ago

If you block those internal subdomains from search with robots.txt, does Google still whine?

snailmailman

5 hours ago

I’ve heard anecdotes of people using an entirely internal domain like “plex.example.com” even if it’s never exposed to the public internet, google might flag it as impersonating plex. Google will sometimes block it based only on name, if they think the name is impersonating another service.

Its unclear exactly what conditions cause a site to get blocked by safe browsing. My nextcloud.something.tld domain has never been flagged, but I’ve seen support threads of other people having issues and the domain name is the best guess.

donmcronald

4 hours ago

I'm almost positive GMail scanning messages is one cause. My domain got put on the list for a URL that would have been unknowable to anyone but GMail and my sister who I invited to a shared Immich album. It was a URL like this that got emailed directly to 1 person:

https://photos.example.com/albums/xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xx...

Then suddenly the domain is banned even though there was never a way to discover that URL besides GMail scanning messages. In my case, the server is public so my siblings can access it, but there's nothing stopping Google from banning domains for internal sites that show up in emails they wrongly classify as phishing.

Think of how Google and Microsoft destroyed self hosted email with their spam filters. Now imagine that happening to all self hosted services via abuse of the safe browsing block lists.

r_lee

4 hours ago

if it was just the domain, remember that there is a Cert Transparency log for all TLS certs issued nowadays by valid CAs, which is probably what Google is also using to discover new active domains

beala

4 hours ago

It doesn’t seem like email scanning is necessary to explain this. It appears that simply having a “bad” subdomain can trigger this. Obviously this heuristic isn’t working well, but you can see the naive logic of it: anything with the subdomain “apple” might be trying to impersonate Apple, so let’s flag it. This has happened to me on internal domains on my home network that I've exposed to no one. This also has been reported at the jellyfin project: https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-web/issues/4076

liqilin1567

an hour ago

This reminds me of another post where a scammer sent a gmail message containing https://site.google.com/xxx link to trick users into click, but gmail didn't detect the risk.

EdwardKrayer

4 hours ago

Well, that's potentially horrifying. I would love for someone to attempt this in as controlled of a manner as possible. I would assume it's possible for anyone using Google DNS servers to also trigger some type of metadata inspection resulting in this type of situation as well.

Also - when you say banned, you're speaking of the "red screen of death" right? Not a broader ban from the domain using Google Workplace services, yeah?

im3w1l

4 hours ago

Chrome sends visited urls to Google (ymmv depending on settings and consents you have given)

david_van_loon

2 hours ago

Yes, my family Immich instance is blocked from indexing both via headers and robots.txt, yet it's still flagged by Google as dangerous.

your_challenger

2 hours ago

Them maintaining a page of gotchas is a really cool idea - https://immich.app/cursed-knowledge

meander_water

2 hours ago

> There is a user in the JavaScript community who goes around adding "backwards compatibility" to projects. They do this by adding 50 extra package dependencies to your project, which are maintained by them.

This is a spicy one, would love to know more.

pasteldream

2 hours ago

It links to a commit; the removed deps are by GitHub user ljharb.

jakub_g

4 hours ago

Regarding how Google safe browsing actually works under the hood, here is a good writeup from Chromium team:

https://blog.chromium.org/2021/07/m92-faster-and-more-effici...

Not sure if this is exactly the scenario from the discussed article but it's interesting to understand it nonetheless.

TL;DR the browser regularly downloads a dump of color profile fingerprints of known bad websites. Then when you load whatever website, it calculates the color profile fingerprint of it as well, and looks for matches.

(This could be outdated and there are probably many other signals.)

bmandale

an hour ago

I can't imagine that lasted more than 30 seconds after they made a public blog post about how they were doing it.

gtirloni

2 hours ago

There's a reason GitHub use github.io for user content.

slig

2 hours ago

They're using a different TLD (.cloud / .app). But IIRC, GH changed to avoid cookies leaking with user created JS running at their main domain.

tjpnz

an hour ago

"might trick you into installing unsafe software"

Something Google actively facilities with the ads they serve.

donmcronald

7 hours ago

I tried to submit this, but the direct link here is probably better than the Reddit thread I linked to:

https://old.reddit.com/r/immich/comments/1oby8fq/immich_is_a...

I had my personal domain I use for self-hosting flagged. I've had the domain for 25 years and it's never had a hint of spam, phishing, or even unintentional issues like compromised sites / services.

It's impossible to know what Google's black box is doing, but, in my case, I suspect my flagging was the result of failing to use a large email provider. I use MXRoute for locally hosted services and network devices because they do a better job of giving me simple, hard limits for sending accounts. That way if anything I have ever gets compromised, the damage in terms of spam will be limited to (ex) 10 messages every 24h.

I invited my sister to a shared Immich album a couple days ago, so I'm guessing that GMail scanned the email notifying her, used the contents + some kind of not-google-or-microsoft sender penalty, and flagged the message as potential spam or phishing. From there, I'd assume the linked domain gets pushed into another system that eventually decides they should blacklist the whole domain.

The thing that really pisses me off is that I just received an email in reply to my request for review and the whole thing is a gas-lighting extravaganza. Google systems indicate your domain no longer contains harmful links or downloads. Keep yourself safe in the future by blah blah blah blah.

Umm. No! It's actually Google's crappy, non-deterministic, careless detection that's flagging my legitimate resources as malicious. Then I have to spend my time running it down and double checking everything before submitting a request to have the false positive mistake on Google's end fixed.

Convince me that Google won't abuse this to make self hosting unbearable.

akerl_

4 hours ago

> I suspect my flagging was the result of failing to use a large email provider.

This seems like the flagging was a result of the same login page detection that the Immich blog post is referencing? What makes you think it's tied to self-hosted email?

david_van_loon

2 hours ago

I'm in a similar boat. Google's false flag is causing issues for my family members who use Chrome, even for internal services that aren't publicly exposed, just because they're on related subdomains.

It's scary how much control Google has over which content people can access on the web - or even on their local network!

foobarian

4 hours ago

Wonder if there would be any way to redress this in small claims court.

throwaway-0001

26 minutes ago

I’m also self hosting gitea and pertainer and I’m trying this issue every few weeks. I appeal, they remove the warning, after a week is back. This is ongoing for at least 4 years. I have more than 20 appeals all successfully removing the warning. Ridiculous. I heard legal action is the best option now, any other ideas?

jstrong

3 hours ago

google: we make going to the DMV look delightful by comparison!

elphinstone

3 hours ago

They are not the government and should not have this vast, unaccountable monopoly power with no accountability and no customer service.

stonogo

3 hours ago

the government probably shouldn't either?

userbinator

32 minutes ago

At least the government is normally elected.

o11c

2 hours ago

Honestly, where do people live that the DMV (or equivalent - in some states it is split or otherwise named) is a pain? Every time I've ever been it has been "show up, take a number, wait 5 minutes, get served" - and that's assuming website self-service doesn't suffice.

ggm

3 hours ago

Is there any linkage to the semifactoid that immich Web gui looks very like Google Photos or is that just one of the coincidences?

russelg

3 hours ago

Not a coincidence, Immich was started as a personal replacement for Google Photos.

ggm

2 hours ago

The coincidence here would be google flagging it as malware, not the origin story of the look and feel.

russelg

2 hours ago

Oh my bad, I severely misinterpreted your comment.

dvh

24 minutes ago

And yet if you start typing 192 in chrome, first suggested url is 192.168.l00.1

renewiltord

5 hours ago

I think the other very interesting thing in the reddit thread[0] for this is that if you do well-known-domain.yourdomain.tld then you're likely to get whacked by this too. It makes sense I guess. Lots of people are probably clicking gmail.shady.info and getting phished.

0: https://old.reddit.com/r/immich/comments/1oby8fq/immich_is_a...

donmcronald

4 hours ago

So we can't use photos or immich or images or pics as a sub-domain, but anything nondescript will be considered obfuscated and malicious. Awesome!

shadowgovt

an hour ago

> The most alarming thing was realizing that a single flagged subdomain would apparently invalidate the entire domain.

Correct. It works this way because in general the domain has the rights over routing all the subdomains. Which means if you were a spammer, and doing something untoward on a subdomain only invalidated the subdomain, it would be the easiest game in the world to play.

malware1.malicious.com

malware2.malicious.com

... Etc.