Dear Playboy (and you too??) your sites are blocked by Trend Micro on millions of PCs
 

Dear Playboy,

Trend Micro anti virus blocks GoFuckYourSelf.com and probably other properties of yours as well directly in consumers Firefox and IE.

The install base of Trend Micro Antivirus is at least several million PCs. This isn't generating a warning, it's a dead end. So, unless a consumer chooses to manually edit their AV settings they can't click through to see any one of your URLs or load any page content pulled from a blacklisted URL. Furthermore, other companies purchase their highly biased and inaccurate information and use it to filter email, integrate with firewalls and routers.

If a user wants to unblock a domain in their browsers, it's this much work:

open main console
goto internet email and controls
under protection from web threats , click "settings"
click "Edit your list of approved websites"
click add website
enter in your website like this : "http://www.gofuckyourself.com/*
and also "http://gofuckyourself.com/*
(no home user is going to think to add "http://*.domainname.com" to pick up www. or any other second level domains)

I haven't actually seen any top banner ads (including my own) in months from my home PC because I forgot to unblock the no-www record with this Dell I grabbed at Best Buy one day that came pre-installed with Trend Micro (I never would have chosen this).

Yes, if you have any sites on their name based black list it's actually affecting revenues. Even if your sites aren't, you would be surprised, many sponsors (etc) and ad networks have their URLs blocked. The online submission form for "re-review" on Trend Micro does not produce results and support is truly useless based upon our experience.

There is no silver bullet, quick fix or even slow fix that is free. If your URLs or those of someone you know are blocked but truly "shouldn't be" because they are not currently malicious, there IS a solution that I can vouch for:

Our lawyer, well respected industry veteran Corey Silverstein has unblocked URLs recently for MojoHost clients improperly victimized by Trend Micro's "efforts".

Don't let yourself be stolen from! MojoHost customers feel free to discuss with me directly. Everyone else, Corey is available for retainer.

Cheers,

Brad

Bump for Mojo-stice!

can you post the domain list here or something?

Damned. Guess it was bound to happen.

dont forget http://www.gfy.com and https://gfy.com ...


Maybe picking up more major domains leading to your main page fer instance like thehun has like every thehun.whatever leading to his domain. Unless they have a system to update thier list of blocked domains and find new domains leading thier might help. This might be usless method but it goes along with my first thought of gfy.com being blocked too.

Wouldn't it figure that there is no published list of blacklisted URLs for security reasons? LOL

I don't think they even had an online query to let you look up domains manually if one wanted to see if they were blocked without installing their software.

Criminal, I think.

Brad

Dude, it's messed up. My client in particular had no actual negative history, this wasn't tied to any shared IP hosting, was utilizing new IP space, and had a mixture of different adult, non adult and personal domains blocked without any commonality that we could ascertain - they weren't even all on the same server.

Brad

Well, it would certainly explain some things. Will have to keep it in mind. I wonder what their [blacklist] formula is based on.

Trend Micro uses entirely proprietary methods to determine URLs to globally block and blacklist. Their blocks are not based upon network, etc and what I speak of was not a parental filter for adult content.

Just to clarify, I think the internet is a hostile place. I don't fault them or any other vendor for honest efforts to protect the world from true threats. We all appreciate the complexity and importance of this work to be done.

My issue is that there is not a timely, fair, accessible or judicious review process with which to remove innocent sites from global blacklist on all mediums such as browser, email, firewall, and router.

The first time I knew of the existence of this kind of browser filtering was really the first boot-up of this fresh Dell PC from Best Buy...... I couldn't load GFY. I fixed that and didn't think much of it.

On another day I was surfing a free porn site of one of my customers (I don't grant myself access to client servers) and noticed that an includes advertisement on the right of the page had the error (which basically displays similar to a 404). I brought this up to my client and they changed the advertisements to not pull from that advertiser's URLs. So, that problem was fixed.

It really got my attention on some subsequent Friday or Saturday night when I thought to surf the site of a client who just completed a move to our service. I had gotten this email saying boy things are fast and wanted to see how fast was fast. LOL Well, come to find out, this URL was blocked by Trend Micro (and ultimately many more) - for no reason and at this point nobody knew for how long.

I subsequently instructed Corey to handle the situation for our client on our tab due to it's unique nature, wanting to learn from it and because it was affecting a smaller sized customer without perhaps the budget to take this fight on themselves. As a result of some complex and time consuming efforts, it did in fact get completely resolved.

Unfortunately, there is still no timely or judicious process publicly available. There is no ability to query their system to even find out what is affected or report false positives and know they will be corrected. I saw value as a host/ISP in perhaps get credentialed, maybe even subscribing to a service allowing us access to query their data source so that we could police our network for false positives and help our clients pro-actively. No response to that suggestion, unfortunately.

My only solace in this situation is my confidence that Corey's firm can resolve this situation for righteous site owners experiencing a loss in revenue due to Trend's errors, especially now that he has previous experience with this entity.

Cheers,

Brad

Its based against the worlds number 1 threat which is me.. What im gonna do is sit and enjoy a nice cup of coffee.

Bump for Brad Mitchell :)

that sucks..................

:thumbsup:thumbsup

Webroot does the same thing

Speaking about blocking,this firefox extension:
http://adblockplus.org/en/
block all kind of ad.I using it too,and everytime when i install banner rrom some sponsor i need to check how it look on site in IE since in firefox wont be visible.For example openx script which is most common choice for ad serving is totaly blocked,you cant even see images of that script if you installing it with firefox.
Site of adblock have alexa rank 32544 so i would say that is nice group of people not seeing ads.

i was under the impression they used siteadvisor to tie in what sites they block , making it a public list you can check your own site on

http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/bangbros.com

Thats an interesting link for sure. I'm not certain, I would think McAfee and Trend Micro would be total competitors.

Brad

I guess it's time for me to get a Hawaiian shirt, a BRO drink in my hand, and bust out some Toejo.

Is there not a way to see this in server logs?
Or does the request not even make it out to the live internet and is blocked internealy to the users PC.
Does anyone know how they are blocking the sites.
It would be great to have a tool that could be easy to you and check sites..
McAfee and Trend Micro are not the only ones blocking sites from the quick search on google it looks like AVG will or is also doing this. I would guess that there are or will be more.

Speaking of hilarious blacklisting, up until some time in the last few weeks, Opera 9 blocked basically every CCBill affiliate link by popping up a giant warning box if you clicked any link that started with http://refer.ccbill.com.

usefull link, thanks :)

Hands down there is no competition. Trend Micro is a far better product..

I have NEVER had an issue getting to GFY and I have used Trend for years now. 4 to be exact. What version are you using?

Check this

http://www.viruslist.com/en/viruses/...virusid=116150

I'll have to check tonight when I get home, whatever version came pre-installed on that Dell I bought at Best Buy. :/

I'll have to find some more time today to understand this, it definitely seems to indicate GFY's urls for a trojan. Nonetheless, this listing was in March of 2006 and they're supposed to re-check URLs or at least one would hope so.

Brad

Brad check me!! I will use Corey in a second for this :thumbsup

Probbaly because of all the cheaters spamming their links in the link trade forums. I'd hasn't been the first time I've traded with someone there and 2 weeks later my alarms are going off as I check my trades. :2 cents:

hi brad.
i love you.
meow.
bye.

nothing new but i am sure many dont know trend micro habits.

We'll get checkin'

Brad

I had trend preinstalled on my Dell laptop, it doesn't block any of the sites for me.

Another service that blocks adult sites is OpenDNS.org. It does this via DNS request. While much of its use is legit (work networks, for example) it might quickly get out of hand or the blocking might get too broad...

So the only way to check this would be by installing their soft?