malware protection

[hauskalainen]

hauskalainen last edited by

I visited a website http://www.biolan.fi/suomi/kompostorit/pikakompostori-220-eco which opened in opera perfectly well. The website is in the Finnish language so I tried opening the google translated version of the page. However, this result threw up a malware protection problem.

I then went back and opened the google cach version of this web page and this opened perfectly well. But when I tried opening the Google translated version of the google cached page, it again triggered a malware warning.

So here is the question. Am I to interpret this as meaning that Google is adding malware? I find that hard to believe but it seems to be the only logical conclusion.

PS I use F-Secure for antivirus and malware protection but this has not reported a problem. I am therefore partly of a mind to think that Opera is flagging up a false positive. If so, someone at Opera might try looking into why Opera is showing this behavior.

PPS I am using Opera 12.10 because I dislike the later versions of opera which to my mind have reduced functionality, or at least the functions I like to use in 12.10 were not in the later versions I reviewed.

[sgunhouse]

sgunhouse Moderator Volunteer last edited by

The site does have several translations available ... what language were you translating to?

Here is their English version of the same page.

[hauskalainen]

hauskalainen last edited by

Thanks, but that only answers the content issue. The reason for posting the comment here was to understand whether Opera was flagging a false positive (i.e. is there a bug in Opera malware protection) or whether Google is adding malware when it translates the page. I would still be interested in any comments from Opera developers who could explain what is happening.

Incidentally I just had the same problem with a spanish language wikipedia page. The Wikipedia page opens normally but the google translated version of the page flags is blocked by opera at first opening. I can by-pass the block if I accept the risk, but I'd rather not do that at this point. It seems that this is not something specific to the Finnish web site but something connected to Google Translate. Has someone falsely flagged Google Translate as dodgy website? That was my first thought. But then I noticed that I can at least open Google Translate if I navigate to that web page. I used Opera's web search engine to get to the google translated version of these web pages. I added googletranslate as a web search engine and assigned it the three letter code gtx. When I was at the web page I want translated I preceded I go to the address field in Opera and precede the web address with gtx followed by space and then ENTER. I have used this facility for years to translate web pages and it has never thrown up a problem until now

[blackbird71]

blackbird71 last edited by

There have been a few comments in the past from Firefox users about Google Translate causing odd warning problems with certain cached pages. In those cases, the Firefox message is: "Translated in Safe Mode. This may cause problems with some websites, especially those that use plugins like Flash." In translating your biolan.fi cached page via Firefox 34, I got that very same warning message. For some users, a similar kind of problem produces a somewhat different Firefox message: "This page was not retrieved from its original location over a secure connection.", even though an http link was involved. It's only a guess, but it may be that Google caching involves some https transactions that raise some kind of security flags when the cached page is accessed via the Google translate function.

I'm not sure what Opera is picking up (or Firefox, for that matter), but there is definitely something in the handshake with Google Translate of Google-cached pages that can produce something in the way of security caution flags on at least two flavors of browsers.

Can you recall/reproduce exactly what the Opera "malware" warning's wording was?

[jm4444]

jm4444 last edited by

Using latest Opera Stable, I get the exact same "This page was not retrieved etc." message as the Firefox users, making me suspect that the message comes from Google, not the browser. Doesn't sound like a malware protection message, just a warning that it was http, not https (maybe).