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| Thread ID: 57554 | 2005-05-06 01:44:00 | *Attention*- Possible security breach by the Googles Webaccelerator if members use it | KiwiTT_NZ (233) | PC World Chat |
| Post ID | Timestamp | Content | User | ||
| 352532 | 2005-05-06 01:44:00 | Quote from an article "I'm having to pay a coder just to figure out how to prevent Google from caching all the webpages on our forums. Why is this a problem? Well first of all, it's a giant security hole, as private forums for mods and admins can now be viewed by anybody. Thanks Google, thank you very much for sharing our sensitive information with the entire Internet, without even giving warning or notice to any parties involved! Secondly, our forums offer a private messaging feature, where users can send messages to each other which can only be read by them. It's like AIM or ICQ, but through a webpage. If you're using Google's Web Accelerator - guess what? - now anybody can read your private messages! Cookies, logins, sensitive information, private messages - they're all stored on Google's servers now, and they're all available for anybody on the Internet to read." see full article here (www.somethingawful.com) |
KiwiTT_NZ (233) | ||
| 352533 | 2005-05-06 02:41:00 | Actually, it's because stoopid site admins leave stuff out there for the Googlebot (or anyone else with a little ingenuity) to see. The Googlebot does not hack into sites or anything illegal like that. | vinref (6194) | ||
| 352534 | 2005-05-06 02:45:00 | This (johnny.ihackstuff.com) site may be of interest. | Rob99 (151) | ||
| 352535 | 2005-05-06 02:56:00 | Google have been taken to court in the past due to its Bots invasive tactics so this doesn't surprise me, The other breaches have been related to its News Gathering service accessing,cacheing and displaying content of sites that require registration. And its Image gathering feature displaying pictures from pay-to-view sites (other wise known as porn) |
Metla (12) | ||
| 352536 | 2005-05-06 03:06:00 | Google has beaten off many of those court cases. The one involving Agence Presse France is to do with "copyrighted content". The porn I don't know about... The moral of the story is though, do not trust the internet with your personal info, least of all forums. The ihackstuff site linked to by Rob99 is shocking example. | vinref (6194) | ||
| 352537 | 2005-05-06 03:21:00 | I think this is different. Using the Web accelerator it can access areas of the forum you have signed on to get into. If you have a forum with differing levels of access, this can be of concern. --- "as private forums for mods and admins can now be viewed by anybody" I am a moderator on another forum, hence my concern with this. |
KiwiTT_NZ (233) | ||
| 352538 | 2005-05-06 03:38:00 | Ah, yes. That is different. Hmmmmmm. | vinref (6194) | ||
| 352539 | 2005-05-06 04:06:00 | It's not just the GWA that does this. It can happen with any proxy setup. Link below is one example. forums.overclockers.co.nz |
Jeremy (1197) | ||
| 352540 | 2005-05-06 04:11:00 | As far as the court cases go, Google have pretty much won them, but the conditions imposed on them are the reason their news service is still in beta phase,and I think that they have a bunch of other cases going through the courts,and more lined up once those are done. Looks like this will just be part of their business, dealing with constant court cases. As to the porn, The courts decided google could catologe them and display a thumbnail but not the full image, More cases I believe pending over that issue as well. At the end of the day the people behind the sites have to decide if they want google exposure,or lock them out of the content and recieve less hits. |
Metla (12) | ||
| 352541 | 2005-05-06 04:28:00 | It's not just the GWA that does this. That is a known issue and good forum design can get around those issues |
KiwiTT_NZ (233) | ||
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