Old Palm Website Flagged "Bad" By Google

While browsing Palmaddicts, I came upon a link to an article at The Inquirer with a misleading headline suggesting that Google was pronouncing PalmOS utilities as dangerous to your computer. In fact, Google actually is referring to the hosting website as shown in this screenshot:



When you actually click on the "This site may hard your computer" link you get this page:


It's not too informative except for the final comment which explains that, "In some cases, third parties can add malicious code to legitimate sites, which would cause us to show the warning message." The first comment in the original Inquirer article gives us a better explanation than either Google or The Inquirer, pointing us to another Inquirer article. It seems that a few months ago, crackers began to take advantage of a flaw in Microsoft's SQL Server software which allows them to inject malicious code into web pages. Most webmasters have since fixed that problem but palmsource.com is actually an old website for PalmSource the company which owns Garnet (the official name for version 5 of the Palm Operating System) and which was bought by ACCESS a couple of years ago. Since buying PalmSource, ACCESS has sold the Palm name back to Palm and is working to build a new operating system with a new name. So it appears that ACCESS never bothered to update their old website even after a serious exploit made it vulnerable to being hacked. This makes me wonder if ACCESS will approach their new OS with the same care.