Slashdot Mirror
"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.')"
How is that a troll?
Because it's a one-word answer to an unasked question that parrot's the American Dream (tm): "Get rich without having to do anything".
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.
And that's why the American legal system is FUTA. In most sensible countries, you *can* sue them *if* you have experienced a major problem due to their behaviour - eg, if you can show that you have lost money/posessions/safety etc as a direct result of someone else having access to your emails. You can't just go "I feel slightly aggrieved that someone read my email - give me a bajillion dollars!!!!".