Once, I was looking for tracklist for the classic drum & bass mix-set Enicma -- Deep Drums Manifesto. Google threw the usual bunch of results, one of which being really interesting:

Warning -- visiting this web site may harm your computer

Suggestions:

• Return to the previous page and pick another result.
• Try another search to find what you're looking for.

Or you can continue to http://x.x/x [link shown as plain text, not inside an anchor -- ML] at your own risk.

Advisory provided by Google

Dear Google! Can you explain me, how a web page (binary data transferred over the network) can harm my computer?

As you might know, there is no easy and common way to damage a computer by malfunctioning software (malware as you call it). That is -- to damage a computer meaning to damage its internals (circuits, ICs). There are certain exceptions (there was a virus that erased flash BIOS, but then again -- BIOS is software). Let us consider it generally impossible.

By damaging one's computer you probably mean to damage its software by altering or deleting certain files.

But first, the software must be run on the attacked system. It can't do anything harmful as long as it is only data stored on some hard drive on the other end of the world. That means we must have already been using a program that downloaded and executed the malfunctioning code from the site.

There is no easy way to avoid such software -- I don't know myself, what such Acrobat Reader does upon startup and then while opening files. So here is the role of the operating system -- to protect important files from being modified. One OS known to be extremely insecure is MS W****ws.

So by saying that a web site may harm my computer you probably mean that it may do something wrong to my W****ws system. On the other hand, W****ws is malfunctioning software (malware) out of the box with its infamous blue screen feature and impressive number of viruses, worms, bugs and patches.

Does it mean then -- visiting this web site may cause your W****ws work even worse than previously? Why can't you just admit it straight-out?