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Comment by magicalist

The closest analog would be antivirus software deciding your legitimate app was malware, but I can't find any lawsuits over that with some quick searching. Anyone remember one?

Punishing anti-malware software for false positives may feel like it could be warranted at times (at least in cases of anti-competitive actions or extreme incompetence), but it seems like it would set an extremely poor precedent. Even worse would be someone winning a case like "yes, there was malware, but you should have sent users though anyway."

Which kind of points to the reason why you probably won't see a case like this go far. Whether or not it's bad from the website's point of view, users chose to install a browser that blocks what it thinks are infected sites, and there's still the option (however small or hidden) to click through or disable the warning. There are also tools to figure out why you're blocked (I'm not sure about Microsoft or Opera's system, but I assume so), even if they can be annoyingly slow in internet time.

I don't think there's any more case than suing over a browser displaying a broken lock icon (or not loading a page at all) when you serve content over mixed secure and insecure connections, or warning that a self-signed certificate is untrusted and may be an attempt to hijack and redirect you.

parent magicalist 14 years ago

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