Photographing the Photophographers

On my way to lunch I caught all the Central Park photographers taking a break from the their photo-taking profession. Tourism has been slow and catching the majority of the photographers from Central Park taking shelter from the mid-day sun under the shadow of a tree is a good indication that things are slow.

These photographers charge Q15/$1.75 per photo. They live mostly from national and regional tourism. Next time you come to La Antigua Guatemala, have your photo taken by one of these photographers and make sure you take a photo of the photographer as well so you can keep both images together as confirmation of how simple it is to help others earn a honest and decent living.

Notes on Google’s Safe Browsing Advisory Monopoly: Two nights ago my hosting company suffered a “DNS poison attack” on their DNS servers, which basically means that DNS server has received such non-authentic data and caches it for future performance increase, it is considered poisoned, supplying the non-authentic data to the clients of the server.

In plain English it means that when you were supposed to be taken to AntiguaDailyPhoto.Com files hosted in one their computers (servers), you instead were redirected to a site in China, listed as suspicious. The telephone equivalent would be, you dial your friend Manolo in Toronto but Christian in Zimbabwe answers your call; you try to dial several times and each time Christian responds how many viagra pills are you going to order?

The actual files that make up AntiguaDailyPhoto.Com were never compromised and AntiguaDailyPhoto never hosted malware. It was simply an incident of URL redirection.

Anyhow, the whole incident lasted less than a couple of hours, but sufficient time for Google to put a safe browsing warning for AntiguaDailyPhoto. I have contacted Google Webmaster Tools several times requesting that the warning be removed, but so far they have not responded and I am not sure how long it would be before they remove the warning. I have verified through independent web scanning services like McAfee SiteAdvisor, Unmask Parasites and Stopbadware.org; all of them come back with a green flag for AntiguaDailyPhoto.

Here I see the problem with ONE COMPANY having too much control, in this case Google, which puts a safety warning for an incident that lasted less than two hours and they can take several days if not weeks to remove the warning. Without third party verification or control, Google can take as long as they please to remove a red flag. Monopolies are never good. From this point forward, I will make sure to use as many search engines and services as possible. I will not give Google total control over my tiny web parcel. Let a lesson be learnt here!

© 2009 – 2020, Rudy Giron. All rights reserved.