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MarcelG
Retired Support Moderator
Netherlands
2625 Posts |
 Posted - 09 May 2005 : 04:46:43
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Has anyone been reading this article at eWeek lately regarding the problems that Google Web Accellerator creates for forums ?
quote:
Google Inc.'s Web Accelerator application, launched as a test on Wednesday, uses a combination of local and server-based caching and preloading of Web pages to more quickly serve Web pages to a user's browser. Google's servers, in many ways, act as an intermediary between Web sites and a user's browser.
But Google's approach has had some unintended consequences. Google officials Friday confirmed that the company was aware of as many as five sites where Web Accelerator was returning users cached pages under other people's user names.
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The forum site, Somethingawful.com, was among those warning its users to avoid Web Accelerator because of reports that pages from other users' logins were exposed.
The guys from Google say it's not that big a deal...
quote:
It is an unfortunate problem, but it looks worse than it is.
We are caching those pages on the server side with the user name on them…You see it, but it's important to point out that you are not logged in as user and you do not have the session cookies needed to perform operations as [that] user.
But...I don't think that's the entire story ... you can see the page that was intended for another user! So, no more 'For Your Eyes Only'...
They mention something about 'Cache-control' headers which need to be available in the page, so tell the Google servers that that page is not intended to be cached.
I'm not sure if Snitz is 'ready' for this... Perhaps some of the guru's here know the details of it, and what needs to be done with the Snitz code to prevent this kind of behaviour. |
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Edited by - MarcelG on 09 May 2005 04:47:46 |
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Shaggy
Support Moderator
Ireland
6780 Posts |
Posted - 09 May 2005 : 08:27:08
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I disagree, this isn't something the dev team needs to be working on a "fix" for as it's not a problem at their end. What we as webmasters need to do is contact Google and put pressure on them to fix this problem. For them to say it's not that big a deal makes them look like they seriously don't know how the internet works.
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MarcelG
Retired Support Moderator
Netherlands
2625 Posts |
Posted - 09 May 2005 : 10:00:47
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No, sorry...please don't get me wrong; I didn't mean to shove this 'problem' to the dev team, I just thought that this section was the appropriate place to discuss this possible issue.
And, perhaps the addition of one line to inc_header.asp would solve this issue for Snitz boards.
I've been reading some background on the Cache Control headers now, and as far as I can see if we were to add these lines to inc_header.asp it would be 'solved'.
<meta HTTP-EQUIV="Pragma" content="no-cache" />
<meta HTTP-EQUIV="Cache-Control" content="no-cache" />
About the prefetching (which can seriously affect your statistics reliability....) the only thing I read on google is this:
quote:
I want to block/ignore prefetch requests. What should I do?
To block or ignore prefetch requests (from Google and other web sites), you should configure your web server to return a 404 HTTP response code for requests that contain the "X-moz: prefetch" header.
Ehm??? Now I'm lost!...... |
portfolio - linkshrinker - oxle - twitter |
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MarkJH
Senior Member
United Kingdom
1722 Posts |
Posted - 09 May 2005 : 11:28:07
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The Web Accelerator page now says
"Thank you for your interest in Google Web Accelerator. We have currently reached our maximum capacity of users and are actively working to increase the number of users we can support."
I wonder if that's Google speak for "Oops, this didn't work as good as we expected it too. I think we'd better pull it before too many people see how big a mistake we made."  |
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MarcelG
Retired Support Moderator
Netherlands
2625 Posts |
Posted - 09 May 2005 : 11:45:34
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lol, indeed...'Google' and 'having too little capacity' are two terms that cannot be used together  |
portfolio - linkshrinker - oxle - twitter |
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Davio
Development Team Member
Jamaica
12217 Posts |
Posted - 09 May 2005 : 16:44:16
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I removed it after reading that persons were seeing forum pages logged in as someone else. Since I browse a lot of forums, I can't afford google caching those pages and somebody else happen to get a cached copy of it.
Also the thought of google knowing my username and password for sites that are not encrypted, that was just a no-no for me. So bye bye Web Accelerator. At least until you have matured some more.
Plus it wasn't seeing much of an improvement in browsing speed. Firefox was already fast already for me. |
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