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"Going Google" Exposes Students' Email
A ReadWriteWeb piece up on the NY Times site explores the recent glitch during the move of a number of colleges onto Google's email service that allowed a number of students to see each others' inboxes for a period of more than three days. Google would not give exact numbers, but the article concludes that about 10 schools were affected. "While the glitch itself was minor and was fixed in a few days, the real concern — at least at Brown — was with how Google handled the situation. Without communicating to the internal IT department, Google shut down the affected accounts, a decision which led to a heated conversation between school officials and the Google account representative. In the end, only 22 out of the 200 students were affected, but the fix was not put into place until Tuesday. ... The students had access to each other's email accounts for three solid days... before the accounts were suspended by Google. Oddly enough, this situation seems to be acceptable [to Brown's IT manager, who] 'praised Google for its prompt response.' (We don't know about you, but if someone else could read our email for three days, we wouldn't exactly call that 'prompt.')"
" Oddly enough, this situation seems to be acceptable [to Brown's IT manager, who] 'praised Google for its prompt response."
In my NSHO three days is pretty fast for a free service. You want faster response times, 100% avail and dedicated engineers? For free? Sorry, no can do.
Everytime i see an article like this all i can think is "what Microsoft backed puppet wrote this crap?". Microsoft is working very hard to make out Google as craptastic, greedy and customerhating as them. For me it has the opposite effect, Google becomes the underdog with Microsoft kicking them in the groin. I find myself feel for Google in the search market despite their 90% marketshare.
Way to go Microsoft, no PR in the world coming from Google could accomplish that feat, feeling sorry for a market leader. ;D
HTTP/1.1 400
How is that a troll? I'd be suing if I got that kind of service from an e-mail service provider. They're selling you a service and support. If they don't provide it, you deserve compensation.