Users of Firefox and Chrome may have a little difficulty access some pages on the Pirate Bay, or indeed any other site that uses the bayimg service provided by TPB.

A series of malware alerts, sent to Google, have resulted in sites being flagged by their content advisory service.

If you’re on Chrome, the advisory is alarmist, and contains the phrase “visiting this page now is very likely to infect your computer with malware”

Thankfully, Firefox is LESS alarmist, and calls it an attack page saying “many are compromised without the knowledge or permission of their owners”

So, what happened? Firefox gives the answer, linking to the Google safe browsing diagnostic for bayimg, which paints a very different picture than the page generated by Chrome as a result.

The Pirate Bay team told TorrentFreak that it’s related to one of their ad partners who “screwed up.” There should be no malware threats now and eventually the warnings should disappear too.

As often happens, it’s an issue with ad networks, but Chrome’s warning underscores the problems, again, of automated systems, in that they’re geared to specifics, and miss nuances. And they’re easy to subvert for unintended use. Meanwhile the unintended consequences continue, with sites using bayimg also getting flagged as a result.

Just another reason automated tools aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.