I posted yesterday to the American Dialect Society mailing list on acronymphomania ‘fondness for acronymns’ and investigativive [rather than investigative] journalism, both caught on the radio, and added a note of complaint (slightly edited here):
Meanwhile, on an unrelated topic, it seems that this morning every page that Google pulls up in a web search comes with Google’s malware warning, “This site may harm your computer”. News searches don’t get the warning, but web searches do.
After a little while, the warnings vanished. This morning Chris Waigl e-mailed me this report:
The Guardian, amusingly, reported this under the headline “Google blacklists the entire internet” (here). (Note: Lowercase “internet” appears to be widely accepted now. It’s improperly used by the Guardian of course: they just blacklisted the web, not the internet.)
Human error — someone added a URL alias that expanded to “every URL”.
Oops!
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