Both my laptop and a friend’s laptop seem to have no ability to load images on iNaturalist. When viewing them, it gives what is (hopefully) a false positive malware detection pop-up in connection to the amazon server that hosts the images.
I’m on Google Chrome, they are on Safari. They are listed both as “High Threat” which normally wouldn’t be a false positive, however I’m unsure for the justification behind this.
Here’s how it looks on my end:
On their end images show as a blank grey filled area:
On mine it just shows the “broken image” icon in place of that:
It looks like Malwarebytes is preventing the page on inaturalist.org from loading images hosted on iNat’s AWS repository. Generally, it would be a good idea for a browser extension to block active content (e.g. a script) from being loaded from another domain, but blocking cross-domain images would usually be excessive.
I’m not sure where the change was made that caused this behavior.
Typically, this is not a problem with secondary domains run for the purposes of needed utility. False positives like this used to be a common problem 15 years ago, but a lot of tools like Malwarebytes have improved considerably to the point this shouldn’t really be possible. Yes, it was fine all morning until more recently…as of the last half hour.
It was working fine in Edge here in the UK at 6pm (Greenwich Meantime) but by 8pm the Malwarebytes extension was showing the same issues noted above. However, now at 10:20pm all is working fine again - I assume it was something at the iNaturalist end which has been corrected !?
That pop-up - if you download malware bytes, that’s basically like infecting your computer. It’s, in my opinion, a virus in its own right. Very difficult to get rid of too
Edit: My experience with Malwarebytes was many years ago and it cause me a lot trouble on my Mac system. . Maybe it’s different now
Appears to be solved now.
