They [the Democrats, regarding increased taxes,] say they're not going to take any water out of your side of the bucket, but out of the other side of the bucket.
‹Fred Thompson›
Atlantis: the domain of the Stingray
7May
2005
Sat
12:26
author: Stingray
category: My Ramblings
comments: 0
trackbacks: 0

Google Web Accelerator

Google has a lot of people up in arms; many of them for different reasons. Most people who are a bit perturbed over their offering of a web accelerator. Why? Read on to find out.

Google's web accelerator boasts speeding up people's web experiences. This isn't entirely a bad thing when it comes to people on dialup internet connections. The more complex web pages become, the slower and slower they load on conventional (read: 56K) dialup connections. Google's web accelerator overcomes this by caching an entire web site on their servers and allowing the web accelerator's users to view those pages as if through a proxy.

Now, how is it a bad thing? Well, for one, to bloggers who use some sort of blacklisting anti-spam protection (Atlantis and Mrs. Wagner's Neighborhood among them), those people who surf to their blogs using Google's web accelerator look like a spam bot, and they will not be able to post comments unless the bloggers severly cripple their blacklisting support; which we won't do here.

Second, according to some sources, there is an issue with privacy. Say you visit a web site using Google's web accelerator at which you are supposed to enter a username and password. Well, recall that you are viewing this web site through Google's cache and proxy, so whatever username and password you used is now stored on their servers. Who's to say it's not sitting there for everyone to use? This is a little frightening when you consider some of the secure sites people visit, such as bank and credit card sites.

And, it gets worse. Check out this little tidbit of information from another site:

Well here's the problem, folks: everything you view is now owned by Google. Do you read email? Well now Google reads your email, and now the entire world can read your email. Do you use private messages through a website? Well they aren't private any more; now anybody using Google's Web Accelerator can read them. Every single page you read, every single website you visit, every single cookie you use, every single thing you do on the Internet is now owned by Google and is viewable to anybody using their program. I hope you're completely comfortable with the entire world being able to see every single webpage you read and every single website you visit, because thanks to Google, it's now happening. Check out their privacy policy if you don't believe me.
I'm having to pay a coder just to figure out how to prevent Google from caching all the webpages on our forums. Why is this a problem? Well first of all, it's a giant security hole, as private forums for mods and admins can now be viewed by anybody. Thanks Google, thank you very much for sharing our sensitive information with the entire Internet, without even giving warning or notice to any parties involved! Secondly, our forums offer a private messaging feature, where users can send messages to each other which can only be read by them. It's like AIM or ICQ, but through a webpage. If you're using Google's Web Accelerator - guess what? - now anybody can read your private messages! Cookies, logins, sensitive information, private messages - they're all stored on Google's servers now, and they're all available for anybody on the Internet to read.
Both from SomethingAwful

It seems that secure parts of site only become insecure once someone using Google's web accelerator logs into that secure site. So, the insecure part is only what that person has access to. This can still be a problem because one cannot prevent a person from using this, so if that person has access to sensitive parts of a web site, if the web master has the ability to create .htaccess files, he may want to consider this solution. Other than that, his only recourse is to campaign to have people not use Google's web accelerator.

That's not entirely a bad idea either. So, if you're considering using Google's web accelerator, DON'T—especially if you value your internet privacy.

Now, I'm going to .htaccess certain parts of my sites even more secure.

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