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Thursday, May 5. 2005

Google has released a pretty software tool called Google Web Accelerator. It sets up an intelligent local pre-fetching proxy server that uses Google's immense resources as a cache server. This provides a decent local cache and decent internet cache. The readme states:

Google Web Accelerator uses various strategies to make your web pages load faster, including:

Sending your page requests through Google machines dedicated to handling Google Web Accelerator traffic.
Storing copies of frequently looked at pages to make them quickly accessible.
Downloading only the updates if a web page has changed slightly since you last viewed it.
Prefetching certain pages onto your computer in advance.
Managing your Internet connection to reduce delays.
Compressing data before sending it to your computer.

UPDATE II: SANS weighs in.

Maybe it is just me but this scares the crap out of me. It is the exact antithesis of something like Tor. I know Google has a "Do no Evil" policy, but what with my life time cookie; correlating gmail, google news news and Google usage; storing all my e-mail and now checking out my websurfing including basic username and passwords (e.g. bloglines doesn't use https); not to mention other things like desktop search and Blogger, I am a little freaked. Especially with their head-quarters in America which doesn't have the best track record on privacy. Call me paranoid, but I don't use gmail, I don't let Google set a cookie, and I am certainly not going to install web accelerator.

I am off to buy some more tinfoil for my hats.

UPDATE: Now this is just silly. Calling Google evil for using proxy error pages that have ben use by other programs such an IE and squid for a long time is quite different from being worried about your privacy.

Posted by Dominic White in Security at 13:15 | Comments (0) | Trackback (1)

Last modified on 2005-05-10 10:15

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Google Web Accelerator
I'm seeing lots of concerns about GWA and privacy in the blogosphere:...

Weblog: Firefox
Tracked: May 09, 21:42

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