Google has yet again hit us up with a really nifty utility.
Google Web Accelerator is a public proxy that caches webpages and serves them up to you really fast through Google's servers. The small downloadable executable interfaces seamlessly through IE or Firefox. I checked this out the day it was released, and I was really impressed by it. It sped my webbrowsing up to obscene levels, which is really saying something since I already surf at 3.0 Mbits. Pages loaded almost instantly. It was like browsing HTML files on my desktop.
DO NOT USE GOOGLE'S WEB ACCELERATOR IF YOU VALUE YOUR PRIVACY!
The problem with GWA is that it caches the pages you visit and saves them on public Google servers. They do this so that they can serve the same page up to the next GWA user at superfast Google speed. This sounds great in theory (and works great in practice), but it introduces all kinds of privacy concerns. Visited pages like webmail, forums, private messaging, and other stuff which should never be publicly available is being cached and redistributed to other GWA users.
ZDNet news article about this topic
I have personally seen evidence of just how much of your private online browsing stuff can get cached onto Google's servers, available for anyone to see. I have seen screenshots of people logged into forums under moderator accounts, screenshots of private message listings, and all kinds of other scary stuff. Needless to say, I uninstalled GWA pretty quickly.
I really hope that Google can get this fixed, because I was completely blown away at how fast GWA sped up my browsing.
edit: I posted a thread about GWA when I just downloaded it, but after seeing just how much of a privacy concern it was I immediately PMed Griselda to nuke it. She did so in very short order (thanks Gris :) ). I meant to post a follow-up topic explaining where that missing thread went, and here it is a couple of days late.
Google Web Accelerator is a public proxy that caches webpages and serves them up to you really fast through Google's servers. The small downloadable executable interfaces seamlessly through IE or Firefox. I checked this out the day it was released, and I was really impressed by it. It sped my webbrowsing up to obscene levels, which is really saying something since I already surf at 3.0 Mbits. Pages loaded almost instantly. It was like browsing HTML files on my desktop.
DO NOT USE GOOGLE'S WEB ACCELERATOR IF YOU VALUE YOUR PRIVACY!
The problem with GWA is that it caches the pages you visit and saves them on public Google servers. They do this so that they can serve the same page up to the next GWA user at superfast Google speed. This sounds great in theory (and works great in practice), but it introduces all kinds of privacy concerns. Visited pages like webmail, forums, private messaging, and other stuff which should never be publicly available is being cached and redistributed to other GWA users.
ZDNet news article about this topic
I have personally seen evidence of just how much of your private online browsing stuff can get cached onto Google's servers, available for anyone to see. I have seen screenshots of people logged into forums under moderator accounts, screenshots of private message listings, and all kinds of other scary stuff. Needless to say, I uninstalled GWA pretty quickly.
I really hope that Google can get this fixed, because I was completely blown away at how fast GWA sped up my browsing.
edit: I posted a thread about GWA when I just downloaded it, but after seeing just how much of a privacy concern it was I immediately PMed Griselda to nuke it. She did so in very short order (thanks Gris :) ). I meant to post a follow-up topic explaining where that missing thread went, and here it is a couple of days late.
