Slashdot Mirror
GMail Chat/GTalk Sending Chats To Wrong Recipients
mystikkman writes "In what is a serious bug, GMail Chat/GTalk/Google Hangouts is sending messages to unintended recipients. ZDNet has confirmed first-hand that the glitch is present within Google Apps for Business accounts, including those that have not yet switched over to Google's new Hangouts platform. Messages appear to be visible on the mobile version of Hangouts. There are multiple reports of this issue."
Yeah, that was a mistake, how many times have I accidentally rebooted Linux because I was trying to login to my windows vm.
> GMail Chat/GTalk Sending Chats To Wrong Recipients
You mean besides the NSA?
Reports are emerging that another bug in GTalk is causing computers to catch on fire. This caused a 200% increase in the Google Hangouts user base going up to a record high of 18 people.
Someone needs to tame that wild pointer before it pokes someone in the eye! Seriously though, isn't this part of all that "information sharing" we're doing now, since nothing is private anymore and the gov't feels entitled to read your email?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
GoogleTalk wasn't a bad little app, the only trouble was it couldn't handle group communication (not without tinkering / hosting your own group channel), I see the scales tipped the other way, then fell over and rolled off the table
Snowden told us about this already. Google's been sending them to the NSA for years.
I had a situation a couple of years ago where my current girlfriend recieved an email from the previous one .. they had never met, though around the same time the new gf had noticed the previous girlfriends email address come up in the autocomplete in gmail (though she'd never mailed her).
Hilarity ensued ..
I sent Christie an email asking her to meet me at the lobby at a hotel I'm saying here in Paris. No wonder my wife called this morning to find out what I'm doing in Paris with Christie. I told her I'm reading slashdot at my best buddy's basement.
According to http://www.google.com/appsstatus it seems to have been fixed
I'm often amazed by how buggy Google software is. They have more money than they know what to do with and yet they put out some of the buggiest software. Google Drive is a disaster. I love Google Earth and use it daily but it crashed about 3 times yesterday. Maybe they should invest some of that money in quality control.
Another one of those caching mistakes?
Optimizations are evil!
App apps apps to wrong apps.
Why would anyone trust an app to do anything right? Leave it to real programs.
Of the big, valuable, 'hot' companies, they all are producing increasingly dubious products.
Netflix loves to crash on me and keel off midstream ever so often. Then of course there are the outages. All this whilst their team brags about how awesome they are at availability.
Apple has had a litany of clock mistakes, unlock screen bypass, and of course the maps situation. I will say I don't use Apple products, so this is second hand experience.
Amazon... well about the only thing that seems to work really well is their own web presence. Their prime instant viewing does indeed make netflix look good by comparison. I will say I never used a Fire, so I can't attest to that. EC2 has pretty frequent outages that take down a bunch of big players. Lot's of people come out of the woodwork to white knight and say 'if the clients did it *right*, they wouldn't be so bothered', but it seems self evident that after all this time those major sites still can't figure it out, it's obviously not as viable model as some people desperately want to believe for some reason.
It's as if the entire industry has lost all patience and risks flaky, crappy behavior for the sake of releasing something that sounds exciting and novel.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Such bugs are usually there in Beta releases. This will be fixed in the Production Release.
It's working as designed, the NSA was an intended recipient... oh, sorry, wrong story.
This shouldn't even be counted as a bug; it's merely the publicity for a crippling design flaw. Why? Because it doesn't matter if the wrong recipient gets a message, since the wrong recipient won't have the private key in order to decrypt the message. Sounds like just a minor delivery bug.
Wait... whaddya mean, "whaddya mean, 'key'?"? This is a chat system designed after 1991, and it still doesn't encrypt? Google, you're a few decades behind, when it comes to the tech that our 386s are able to handle.
Hmm... not much reactions going on. If this were to happen to let say Skype or other services, Microsoft and others will get a beating. But when Google fumbles, everybody stays silent and pretty much shrugs everything under the rag.
That was my thought at first, but it's still possible to make this kind of mistake with public key encryption. If the software sends your message to the wrong person, it would probably encrypt with the wrong public key as well.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Are telling me the chat I got about winning the Nigerian Lottery might have been meant for someone else?
On my Google Apps account for my university, I used Google Drive to store all my classwork. Then one day about two years ago when I navigated to my drive, I saw some business's speadsheet (a rather large one with what looked like sensitive information) shared with my account whose owner I didn't know. Could the owner have accidently shared it with me? I don't believe so; my username is a combonation of random letters and numbers with a .edu domain. The speadsheet has since dissapeared, but I don't know when that happened. Has this ever happened to anyone else who uses Google Apps?
When I used to mess with bots for yahoo. You could change I think it was the 6th byte in a private message packet to 0 and it would send what would seem to be somebody else's message to them. In fact a totally random stranger's message would appear in the private message being sent. Haven't messed with that protocol in awhile. Could be still there.
So they send all posts to NSA?
First, you update the Maps app to combine Navigation, and it TOTALLY SUCKS (thank goodness for my Titanium Backup of the older version.) Next, the abomination that is the new Nexus 7. And now, this. How about a little QA, guys?!
While you're at it, please fix the GVoice texting functionality. Receiving texts the day after they were sent is a little pathetic.
You're still the best thing going, but don't be complacent.
sig: sauer
It's not a "bug". It's a "feature".
Coincidence or not, but today I received an out of office reply to an outlook invite sent internally to someone I know at another company. Instead of replying to the sender of the invite, at the same company, GMail seems to have picked my name from the contacts and sent it to me (EXTERNAL). WTF Google? Now I am waiting for something totally confidential to come my way. Note to black hats: get yourself into the contact list of as many people as possible using GMail. You never know what leaks out ...
In what is serious understatement...
Bark less. Wag more.
I haven't experienced this with chat but about 2 weeks ago I got a text through google voice, from someone I don't know, which was intended for someone in my contact list. weird.
C'mon everyone, this is a feature, not a bug! Anyone want to chatroulette?
Didn't ya?
It frequently says a message or photo has been delivered when it hasn't. An hour or so later it'll have a red exclamation mark to retry. It screws up the order of things all the time. I'm hoping the client in OS X 10.9 fixes it, but wouldn't these issues be server side?