An increasing number of people are finding a wide range of websites – including ours – are asking permission to allow downloads to your Mac from googlesyndication.com …
The problem is a rogue ad that has made it through to the Google ad network, which is used by a great many websites. If you do allow the download, it’s just a harmless text file, but it’s annoying to have to keep hitting Cancel to block it.
Fortunately, there’s a simple way to stop the alerts. In Safari, go to the Safari menu, select Preferences and then Downloads from the left-hand menu. Beneath the list of Allowed and Denied sites is an option: When visiting other websites. Just set this to Deny.
You may need to explicitly grant permission for sites you do want to be able to offer you downloads. Simply visit those website and they will appear at the top, under Currently Open Websites. For each of these, select Allow or Ask as desired. They will then be added to your Currently Configured Websites list.
We can also reassure Dave Mark that no cats are involved.
Google should soon block the specific ad causing the problem, but this is a useful thing to configure anyway.
This just popped up on my Mac. My cat was next to my computer, my back was turned, no idea what just happened. 😲 pic.twitter.com/TvmSvtNI7T
— Dark Mode Dave (@davemark) September 23, 2020
