Author Topic: Do NOT use Google's Web Accel (Read 6548 times)

Magmatron · May 05, 2005, 01:51:10 PM

Google has recently come out with the seemingly wonderful Web Accelerator. Unfortunately, this caches everything you read and sends it to Google servers (Extremely condensed info, there). While this is fine for normal web browsing, do NOT under any circumstances use Web Accelerator while browsing forums or anything you want kept private. For example, on the Something Awful forums users are able to read other people's private messages due to them using Web Accel while browsing the forums. There could be many potential security issues with using this. I read about the problem there and am sharing this with you all.

lolfighter · May 05, 2005, 03:02:24 PM

I saw this coming. I mean, if you surf things through Google, if you use Google as a proxy, then it is caek for them to filter out the data.

Goldy · May 05, 2005, 07:42:48 PM

I can't seem to find any info that this exists. You're saying it's software you download from google, right? Similiar to their toolbar? And not something that is always used when you use their search engine..?

Malevolent · May 05, 2005, 08:15:32 PM

Look on the UWE forums in Off Topic. A bunch of stuff is in thread there. There's also a link to SomethingAwful there.

Fewlio · May 05, 2005, 11:35:14 PM

Glad my internets are already fast!

But yeah, I'd use it if I needed it, but I would use a seperate browser for the private internets.

Goldy · May 06, 2005, 08:36:41 PM

Weird, the day I googled "web accelerator", I could find absolutely no info on it. It's a conspiracy!

george · May 06, 2005, 11:13:23 PM

Web accelerators have been doing this for years.
The programs cache all the info you send then threads it in whenever you re-visit or someone else revisits the page you see. But since it uses ALL the info you send it thinks someone else is YOU. Back a few years ago i was in this clan, it was a big clan 50+ members, and one of our admins was at a friends and checked the site under his admin account. His friend had dial up and had d/l'ed an accelerator, he didnt know at the time, so it gave out his account, some punk found it, got in, hit reset on our clan website and PUFF all gone. Why he had access to a site wide reset button i will never know.

Magmatron · May 15, 2005, 10:09:07 AM

Unstickying to make room for an OFFICIAL IMPORTANT SOUNDING TOURNY! Also, Google took down the DL link due to complaints.

lolfighter · May 15, 2005, 06:31:56 PM

Didn't quite see that coming, but fair enough. That particular piece of software was just horrible.

Guspaz · May 19, 2005, 08:18:19 PM

Quote

Unstickying to make room for an OFFICIAL IMPORTANT SOUNDING TOURNY! Also, Google took down the DL link due to complaints.
[snapback]48630[/snapback]

No, Google took down the DL link because their beta was full and they didn't need any more people. Even Google can't sustain a huge amount of people without properly allocating resources to deal with it.