Shock horror! This afternoon, all of the sudden, Google started telling me that everything I was about to click on was a suspect site. I tried Obama, BBC, Ubuntu, Firefox etc. i.e. terms which should usually take you to sites which are high in pagerank and above reproach. Imagine the dark forces of the internet taking over these sites and deploy nasty malware on your machine when you click on the link, which will automatically empty all your bank accounts, puts your house on the market, and sends your kids into slavery. Panic stricken, I went on to another machine, only to find that it was doing the same thing. Oh no, it must have been those probes they sent to Mars, and now the Martians are pissed off. I have vision of the Google headquarters being ambushed and taken over by those guys with atennas on their heads. Total melt down of the world as we know it...

As it happens, the BBC reported it soon after. You can probably see that all the links, if you click on them, will take you to something like this:




Which seems to point to some kind of utility at Google called interstitial. This was reported in 2007. Maybe someone at Google had just pushed the red button to see what it does.

Still, it is a great reminder to us all what happens when the things we completely rely on and takes for granted suddenly is there no more.

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