Slashdot Mirror
Gmail Bug Sends Thousands of Emails To One Man
An anonymous reader writes "TechCrunch is reporting on an interesting Gmail bug. Apparently, if you run a Google search for Gmail while logged in and click one of the top (and correct) results, it brings up a Compose window with an email address already filled in: the Hotmail account of a Fresno, CA man. He says he's been receiving hundreds every hour, most of which are blank, since yesterday. The article says the bug is related to the Gmail outage from earlier this afternoon."
This is hardly a "Gmail bug", but rather Google indexing a direct link to Gmail with the To: field filled out with some random email address. The linkbait-y title of this post made me think that some of my private emails were getting sent to the wrong person.
What, he doesn't already receive thousands of emails everyday that is not for him? Lucky man.
Google was great when it was small and had shared vision.
Now we're seeing the company both have many more screwups, and be more manipulative, basically by trying to force us all to use GoogleBook (or G+ as they call it).
I don't think they're bad people. I think human organizations, when they get too large, become unstable because shared vision is lost and people start treating it as "just a job."
Obviously, no amount of free soft drinks and stock options can remedy that.
I don't think they've lost their shared vision, they seem pretty focused on getting as many people to use Google+ as possible. It seems most like now what they see in their vision is monetizing their users.
Big is just what is needed to topple the corrupt telecommunications oligopoly. If Google can get 1 gb/s fiber here and there and spread it, we're either gonna get 1 gb/s fiber eventually, or the telecommunications oligopolies will be forced to compete and stop deliberately keeping us in the dark ages.
God spoke to me
Hipster gMail user had an account before it was mainstream.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
When you are being DDoSed by motherfucking Google .
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Ok, I could just Google the damned thing, but if you're going to reference "Gmail outage from earlier this afternoon," can you at least link to page giving details of the outage instead of a generic Google Apps status page?
Grumble grumble....
Three Squirrels
Nice try. His email address is noreply@gmail.com. What did he expect?
Well, now he can sue Google. He's not bound by Google's EULA; he's signed up with Microsoft's Hotmail.
Now that this has been posted on slashdot, I wonder how his email will increase as slashdotters try this out.
I think its less 'not doing evil' as much as its 'not staying competent'.
But sloppiness kills..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Google was great when it was small and had shared vision.
Now we're seeing the company both have many more screwups, and be more manipulative, basically by trying to force us all to use GoogleBook (or G+ as they call it).
I don't think they're bad people. I think human organizations, when they get too large, become unstable because shared vision is lost and people start treating it as "just a job."
Obviously, no amount of free soft drinks and stock options can remedy that.
I don't think they've lost their shared vision, they seem pretty focused on getting as many people to use Google+ as possible. It seems most like now what they see in their vision is monetizing their users.
This. At the expense of quality. Somewhere in the definition of doing no evil there must be some clause related to actually testing your junk before releasing updates or not putting in annoying little stupid bits (like the fade on drop-down lists.)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Thanks Obama! :|
Yeah, I think we've located the source of the problem
Say it isn't so.
Google was great when it was small and had shared vision.
...
They still have a shared vision.
Monetize your privacy.
You're not their customer - you're their PRODUCT.
Do people like having Google keep a record of what they are searching for?
This is creepy.
Since I can't download a copy of the internet to my computer so I can search it privately, there doesn't seem to be much choice - even if I trust Duckduckgo or other search engine to not log my searches, I still end up using Google for most of my searches because it works so much better than Duckduckgo. I tried it for a month, and by the end of the month, I was almost always adding "!g" to my searches to run them on Google. So whether or not I *like* Google tracking my search history is not really relevant -- I'm willing to trade that privacy for the use of their search engine. Just as I may not *like* paying the oil industry $4/gallon for gas, but I don't have much of a reasonable choice.
actually testing your junk before releasing updates
Everything Google puts out is "beta." Forever. They used to actually label it as such; this isn't the case anymore but I'm not sure that Google has ever released a product that they considered production-ready.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
So stop using gmail. When it was new it was special - clean simple webmail. Those days are long past. Outlook.com doesn't suck. Some people like Yahoo mail. Neither company does the ubiquitous tracking and analysis that Google does.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
So stop using gmail. When it was new it was special - clean simple webmail. Those days are long past. Outlook.com doesn't suck. Some people like Yahoo mail. Neither company does the ubiquitous tracking and analysis that Google does.
Why do you think that if I don't use Gmail that Google can't track my searches?
Neither company *admits* they do the ubiquitous tracking and analysis that Google does, but I've seen nothing in the Terms of Use and Privacy Policies for either vendor that precludes them from doing so, and both have popular ad networks (well, it looks like Yahoo is using Bing for search and ads), so it seems highly unlikely that they'd cede a competitive advantage to Google by not using customer data to their advantage.
Big is just what is needed to topple the corrupt telecommunications oligopoly. If Google can get 1 gb/s fiber here and there and spread it, we're either gonna get 1 gb/s fiber eventually, or the telecommunications oligopolies will be forced to compete and stop deliberately keeping us in the dark ages.
At least, until Google owns enough of the infrastructure to join the 'big boys' in their little club. Then it'll just be more of the same, but with 1 extra player.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
How many of you read the summary and developed a sudden desire to bombard this poor soul's inbox by trying it for yourselves? Be honest.
I'll start things off by admitting to it myself.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I don't care at all if Google "tracks my searches," since they're tracking most of my web habits anyhow via all their cleverness and ad networks. There's no escaping that. But I don't need to hand them a real-world identity to connect all that stuff to, or an easy way to connect me-on-one-machine with me-on-another.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Yeah, I ran into that eariler this week. The only thing that solved it was to delete all of my cache and cookies. Hasn't happened again.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
... it brings up a Compose window with an email address already filled in: the Hotmail account of a Fresno, CA man.
Nice try. His email address is noreply@gmail.com. What did he expect?
Something doesn't add up...
My company has been having similar errors, I believe its less a Gmail error and more of a Chrome error. When I try to google anything from the nav bar directly I get an insane load time that usually ends in a failure page with the t-rex on it. However if I visit google.com directly in chrome it works just fine. Yet in Firefox I can search anything I want at the top and get speedy results. I find it odd that Googles products don't interact well with one another, yet 3rd parties are able to interface with their services just fine. Somewhere down the line of development people aren't testing and simply aren't worried about consistency of their products. Google could let stuff like that happen a few years back, but they are pushing harder and harder to become an enterprise level service provider and with outages like today, and really inconsistent services they aren't selling themselves well. I personally love Google, I have been to the HQ many times, and interviewed there once before, but I cannot defend the poorly tested and developed stuff they keep pumping out.
Why exactly do you need to use google search to look for gmail when you're already logged in? Hundreds of people are doing that per hour, wtf? Hello? Address bar?
Has he been contacted by the entire population of Nigeria about a couple of pallets of exotic goods all gummed up in customs, and could he help liberate said goods for a tidy profit?
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Egads! Google is becoming Microsoft!!
At least, until Google owns enough of the infrastructure to join the 'big boys' in their little club. Then it'll just be more of the same, but with 1 extra player.
This would be just huge as a switch completely to the dark side for Google. I might even be looking for my pitch fork.
This would be just huge as a switch completely to the dark side for Google. I might even be looking for my pitch fork.
Did Googling for it show 0 results?
I got invited by one of the devs -- and sent out invites to myself when the invite mechanism was turned on (wow! I got *3* invite vouchers!). Now I wish I'd created more addresses back then :D
I don't care at all if Google "tracks my searches," since they're tracking most of my web habits anyhow via all their cleverness and ad networks. There's no escaping that. But I don't need to hand them a real-world identity to connect all that stuff to, or an easy way to connect me-on-one-machine with me-on-another.
You do realize that they don't need you to have a Google account to get your real-world identity and link it to multiple machines, right? They just need a few people you know to have Google accounts. The rest is statistics (unless you keep your site browsing siloed between computers).
Yeah, I ran into that eariler this week. The only thing that solved it was to delete all of my cache and cookies. Hasn't happened again.
Clear the browser's cache and cookies. It's the web 2.0 version of "Have you tried rebooting it?". If you haven't tried it yet, don't even call me.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
This guy has a HOTMAIL account. One of my brothers had a hotmail account about the time hotmail started ...ummm... releasing the names of their users' non-hotmail contacts to spammers.
Point being, maybe this guy should change to a non-hotmail account. Then Google can update their form to the NEXT super-popular hotmail user.
Okay, tongue in cheek all done.
Yes, it is not lost on me that worse than "don't be evil" is the unstated "don't be NSA", and worse than that is "don't be Microsoft", and Google is even messing up that one...
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
there must be some clause related to actually testing your junk before releasing updates
Yeah, the clause is called feature flags. That guy was the randomly selected tester. ; )
It's not Google+, it's Google in general. Ie, I use Google+ but nothing else from google, but I still see them trying to link entirely unrelated things to it, picasa, gmail, youtube. Got too creepy when a basic google search brought up targetted results related to some random youtube video I had seen a week before. Found that there's no way to unlink them from each other, and it even created a youtube "account" for me which was weird.
I use G+ and like it, best feature is that it is NOT facebook, it's certainly not dominant or some cash cow for google. People keep dumping on it like the bad boy when in reality google is not treating it more special than any other application that they half-heartedly support, they just want to combine it all into one network of applications to support their advertising revenue.
It's the Google culture. Creating new stuff is cool, and what all the kiddies at Google love to do. But since they lack adults (at least at the management level) there's no interest in finishing up or maintaining the old projects.
Their ui is pretty clean abd easy ti go around compared to too much information being exposed by the likes of yahoo or microsoft's stuffs.
s/abd easy ti/and easy to/g
Has the recipient been arrested for hacking yet?
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
Why is this modded offtopic? Seems about as ontopic as one can get and something many of us here have been talking about. Google USED to be this cool "throw cool shit at the wall and see what sticks" kind of company but in the last couple of years...they have started getting nasty. The nasty changes in the TOS, the nasty ways of trying to force you to use G+ whether you want it or not... its gotten so bad I now have a "YouTube browser" just to keep from getting that damned popup trying to get me to tie my real name to G+ and YouTube and had to make a throwaway account for my android phone.
I'm sorry guys but Google just ain't the cool fun nerdy company they was, ever since the IPO and G+ its been about squeezing every last penny out of the users to drum up the stock price, not about just making money off doing cool stuff. How much you wanna bet its gonna turn out to be tied to the "exciting new feature" of tying G+ circle crap into Gmail they recently rolled out?
I swear Brin has a bigger chubby for that crappy G+ than Ballmer has for Metro and in both cases its a giant DO NOT WANT but sadly its not about the users in both cases, its about "gotta beat the FB and make teh monies!" for one and "gotta beat the iPad and make teh monies!" for the other.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I thought he was at 192.168.1.1...
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
actually testing your junk before releasing updates
Everything Google puts out is "beta."
These are not Googles products. Googles product is advertisement. And that is not beta. All the "products" you think about (Search, Gmail, Google+, Wave, Newspaper/feed reader, etc.) are just helpers for Googles main product, ads. If they seize their purpose -- reaching many people -- they are dropped.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
Thats how capitalism works. And If / when Google rests on their laurels for too long, another competitor may appear. Granted that doesnt tend to happen terribly quickly with something like internet service (with all the barriers and whatnot), but this would be an odd time to complain about the status quo what with Google shaking things up and what not.
but with 1 extra player.
Dont underestimate that, it can be all the difference in the world.
I guess this is all that this great technology is going to amount to? A shuddering, messy orgasm of advertisements shot into our faces from every angle and service. All the great minds of the world and the engines of wealth creation are focused on displaying shitty ads to everyone; following them around like little digital cookie stalkers. My fucking god this is getting old. Has anyone else stopped to think about the market cap on targeted ads? Is there enough room for Pintrest, GoatBook, FaceBrick, and everyone else to provide the wonderful service of delivering targeted ads? I don't know about you but I do not find any of this exciting. The great scifi minds of our age and ages past forgot to include the dominance and great feat of plastering ads in everyone's face before the downfall. I don't really like FaceBook, at all, but I would pay to not see a single ad on the damned abyssal social cathulu.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
I think it was +0 results.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock