The lovely message many readers of This.org saw this morning.

UPDATE, Sunday, March 28 — Google has re-scanned the site and the problem is solved. Ads will be back, problem-free, in the next day or so.

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If you visited the magazine’s site today using the Firefox or Chrome browsers, you likely saw a window like the one above, warning you that This.org stands accused of distributing malware. Rest assured, this is not the case.

We use a program called OpenX to serve ads on our web pages, and some nefarious person out there hacked it to link to some bad sites. As you can see on Google’s “Safe Browsing Diagnostic Page” for our site, there were six discrete incidents of bad behaviour in the last 90 days — not the end of the world, but still too many. And, it turns out, enough to wind up on Google’s Evil League of Evil masterlist.

We’ve removed all the offending bits of code from the site and requested that Google’s defenders of the realm re-scan the site so we can get back in their good books. The bonus for you is that there won’t be any ads on the site for a day or so while we get the problem sorted out.

Our apologies for the scary red warning sign if you saw it, and for any inconvenience. The site should, as of this moment, present no threat to you or your computer.