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Security Fears Over Google Accelerator
Espectr0 writes "A software tool launched by Google on Wednesday that speeds up the process of downloading Web sites (covered recently on Slashdot) has caused some users to worry about their privacy.
A ZDNet article discusses problems that users have been experiencing with the information that is cached by the software. On a Google Labs discussion group, one user said that 'I went to the Futuremark forums and noticed that I'm logged in as someone I don't know...'" Commentary also available on Signal vs. Noise and BlogNewsChannel.
our new Google Overlords
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
'I went to the Futuremark forums and noticed that I'm logged in as someone I don't know...'
thats not a bug, its a feature.
Starsucks
Its true its true! People are logging on this account and acting like me on this account on /. but it really isnt me! Imposters!
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You'll get better results filing a report with Google as opposed to complaining on
As for me, I used the 3.7 minutes I've saved so far to spend some quality time with my friends.
Perhaps this is just Google's way of finding morelinks to add to it's search index? Imagine gathering millions of websites that it may not have indexed or found yet. All from links that users of the GWA have visited... possible?
Hmmm.
I found it a bit amusing that when I clicked the story link, the destination site, as well as three other sites, each attempted to save a cookie on my computer. Four cookies. To read a news story. That's necessary.
You probably shouldn't click this.
Its a caching proxy server for crying out loud. It caches web pages and feeds you the cached version. This is not new nor is it surprising, especially for a new service offering.
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
I had to remove it from my system. It hijacked my browser, and I was not able to browse my companies internal websites because it over-rode our proxy. Bummer too...it worked great
I'm not a troll, but I play one on Slashdot.
The accelerator prefetches the links on web pages, in effect clicking on all of them (except ads), which includes links that say 'delete this' or 'unsubscribe' etc. Many webpages use GET links to do these actions, and this is causing pages to disappear. Until web apps are rewritten to take note of the prefetch header, it's probably unsafe to use the accelerator. (Which seems to be offline at the moment - the page redirects you to the toolbar)
"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." - Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
this site was pretty useful for information. So was AOL webmaster resources info.
AC comments get piped to
For more info about these known issues with HTTP caching, see the following
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Has anyone read how google will deal with adsense clicks? Since all users of the accellerator will come from the same IP, will that IP decrease in value? (It's well known that the same IP can't just click again and again and generate revenue).
Shouldn't those sites be using the NoCache directive and shouldn't Google be honoring it? I wonder which side is at fault. At any rate, fears about information leakage are kind of silly because of the volume of traffic that Google services. The accelerator allows them to see link patterns, but no one could store, let alone process, an entire day's worth of data after the fact. The same is true for Google Mail: no person ever sees your email; an algorithm does, and tailors simple, pertinent advertising in exchange for an otherwise free service. The accelerator can only make the search engine better for everyone. Anyone that uses it is giving back, contributing to the synergistic knowledge of Google.
Who said it was a cookie that was cached, and not the page content? Much of the discussion thusfar seemed based off what an anonymous quote in a ZDnet article. Far as I can tell, the guy saw "Welcome back, Bob!" and freaked, when he wasn't -actually- logged in as Bob. Furthermore, who says it isn't Futuremark (or their forum software- because we all know how security-conscious PHP/MySQL forum software is) tagging their pages as cacheable when they shouldn't be? If Google is ignoring "don't cache this page", now yes, we have a problem- but the ZDnet story is of a technical level I'd expect of a community newspaper, so it's kind of hard to tell. It's like a story in your city newspaper that read "somebody killed by a cop!" and going off on a rant about police brutality...only to find out later the guy was a bank robber with an Uzi.
Before you get all excited about bank sites etc- keep in mind those often use very unique URLs for each page and other tricks.
Please help metamoderate.
SEE?!!! I told you that if these corporate identity thefts kept up, we'd all end up having the same identity!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I just deleted the accelerator from my system after trying it for the last day, and I must say that it is much less mature than most of the "Beta" products google releases. It caused several significant issues with Firefox on my system, including:
1. Links that open another window stopped working entirely (although they worked if I right-clicked and selected "open in new tab")
2. Even after closing all Firefox windows, a firefox.exe process would remain running, and prevent any new firefox windows from being opened until it was manually killed
3. "Proxy not available" errors when opening several pages at once, such as when using the Firefox "open in tabs" on a folder of bookmarks.
And I haven't even checked into some of these cookie / privacy issues. Perhaps these issues are unique to my system, but my environment is pretty vanilla... I just run a few of the more popular Firefox plugins. Removing the GWA cleared up all of the problems cited above.
Up to this point, I've always been very impressed with the level of testing that has gone into Google software products before they enter Beta. In this case, I'm not. Hope this isn't a sign of things to come.
-R
How long has Google Groups been labelled Beta now, two years maybe? How many users does it have?
If a wide number of even adventurous, risk-taking users could be exposed to a potentially significant security hole, then word should get out more widely than just Google's "thanks for the feedback" e-mail addresses.
Beta is not the Greek word for "without responsibility." As much as we criticize Microsoft for making the idea of a "release date" (or "security") meaningless, I think Google's well on it's way to making the idea of the "Beta Release" meaningless.
They act like a small, groovy coding lab with Beta releases and all, but seemingly aren't simultaneously recognizing that because of their prominence in consumer's minds, *anything* they do has widespread impact on ordinary Net consumers. So a true, uncontrolled Beta release? That's fine for me when I just coded a little midi tool and want to run it past my friends, but there's really no such thing when you're Google.
I think that the number of users that adopt even their least publicized tools takes them out of the realm of the real intent of a Beta release, especially when security issues are involved.
The only acceptable defense of scientific results is to say that they were the product of the Scientific Method.
Here are the headers that the Futuremark forums give me when I am logged in:As you can see, neither "Cache-Control: private" nor "Vary: Cookie" is given. In fact, the server doesn't even give an expiration date for the content. Under these conditions, the HTTP/1.1 protocol says that it is perfectly OK for a cache to keep this page for awhile and serve it to other people.
This problem is firmly the fault of the people who wrote Futuremark's forums. This constitutes a major security hole in the WWWThreads forum package, because this problem will occur when using any standards-compliant HTTP cache. I would strongly recommend against the use of these forums on any web site until they fix their security problems.
(I do not know if other forum software has this problem, but frankly it would not surprise me. It seems lots of PHP developers and other high-level web programmers have no idea how HTTP/1.1 works, and assume that headers are completely unimportant. I have written a web server and forum software myself, though, and I made damned sure that mine produces the right headers.)
The web accelerator is not a robot, so this is correct behavior.
NOARCHIVE is a Google specific extension to the robots.txt specification, and again, this is not a robot.
I'd be absolutely shocked if that were actually the case. I also believe it respects the Expires header as well as the Cache-Control header.
If they're following the proper standards, then it's not their place to care or not. If your website doesn't properly specify cache-control (many don't) then you get what you get.
For any pages with user-specific content, add the "Cache-Control: private" header and voila, problem solved for you.
If you want to opt out entirely, then a simple "Cache-Control: no-cache" header in your HTTP responses would do the trick, as would "Pragma: no-cache", I bet.
Furthermore, there is no cookie-mishanding I've actually seen, and I've tested it. It passes cookies through just fine, without caching them, near as I can tell.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.