Google : WebAccelerator

bringitdown

New beta - http://webaccelerator.google.com

Claims to speed up DSL/Cable speeds

Of course mountains of data about you and your surfing habits will be built up buy Google...

Hmmm.

/edit: has had no effect on my office connection, will try via NTL tonite.

Peteee

Dont care, they already know what i search for and whats in my email!

What more, bizarrely enough i still trust them. After all they've saved me .2 seconds so far today! How could I go wrong!

Khannie

Just use your ISP's proxy servers for http browsing. TBH, the speed increase you get from it will far exceed anything you get from webaccelerator.

Pages load like magic. It's great.

the IOL one is: cache.iol.ie port 80
(stick that in your http proxy setting in your web browser).

Not sure about the eircom one.

lomb

Khannie wrote:

Just use your ISP's proxy servers for http browsing. TBH, the speed increase you get from it will far exceed anything you get from webaccelerator.

Pages load like magic. It's great.

the IOL one is: cache.iol.ie port 80
(stick that in your http proxy setting in your web browser).

Not sure about the eircom one.

can u explain how to do that in firefox ive tried about:config and there is no http proxy setting there

bringitdown

lomb wrote:

can u explain how to do that in firefox ive tried about:config and there is no http proxy setting there

Tools->Options->General->Connection Settings

Manual Proxy configuration

et. voila

Anyone know if NTL have a caching proxy?

Mr E

Tools / Options / General Settings / Connection Settings.

unklerosco

If anyone has the eircom one let me know..

daramullally

bringitdown wrote:

Anyone know if NTL have a caching proxy?

As far as I know NTL use a transparent proxy by default. You can't avoid it, all you can do is enter a specific one in IE.

Khannie

unklerosco wrote:

If anyone has the eircom one let me know..

Google doesn't show up anything obvious.

You could try using the IOL one anyway. They may not restrict access.

Let us know the outcome if you do try this.

LegacyUser

I use a proxy server with NTL, after my connection droppped a few times in the last couple of months. I have the server address if anyone needs it.

Lump

WOoo, I've saved a minute in the last hour!

John

Chalk

Khannie wrote:

Google doesn't show up anything obvious.

You could try using the IOL one anyway. They may not restrict access.

Let us know the outcome if you do try this.

webcache.eircom.net

Fibonacci

how have you saved a whole minute? I've only saved 0.2 seconds in the last several hours?

...still trying to figure out what to do with my extra free time....

zAbbo

Chalk wrote:

webcache.eircom.net

webcache.eircom.net:82

Duffman

I find that using eircom webcache makes no difference to page loading speeds at all

snappieT

How do you tell how much time you've saved?

Ciaran500

Tee link doesn't work anymore. Just leads to the google toolbar page.

Nietzschean

Ciaran500 wrote:

Tee link doesn't work anymore. Just leads to the google toolbar page.

works for me

Ciaran500

Works for me now o_O

Its a conspiracy to make me look crazy.

Nietzschean

Ciaran500 wrote:

Its a conspiracy to make me look crazy.

I think your well able to do it by yourself

zenith

bringitdown wrote:

Claims to speed up DSL/Cable speeds

/edit: has had no effect on my office connection, will try via NTL tonite.

Can't really say it's done a whole lot for me, but it has crashed IE twice, but not firefox. Been using it most of the day.

I'm seeing more 'hanging' than I used to do, though: it may improve the throughput, but it might disrupt the latency ...

Giblet

ATTENTION

Google caches all the websites onto a server and other machines (ala P2P). People have been reporting that they can see other peoples cache'd versions of certain websites. For example, if you are using it, you might be able to see someone elses PM's (although unlikely)

People on SA have been reporting crazy crap happening.

Do not use this.

Nietzschean

its in beta as such odd stuff is to be expected, as regards having other people's pm's... well what decent IM network doesn't encrypt stuff now?

As for seeing cached versions of people's versions of website, is there any proof of this? surely google would have taken steps that if it was stored there the user wouldn't be able to read it...

Giblet

If you are registered to the Something Awful forums, you can read all the crap that happened.

PM as in private messages on a Messageboard.

Google always stays in Beta anyway, this is just stupid.

daveirl

This post has been deleted.

Nietzschean

anything thats actually private should be encrypted , simple as that.........

As regards that website/forum erm i've not seen any proof there, an easily forgeable picture and a massive anti-google rant which leads me to believe its more of a sensational piece in order to get page hits up than much else tbh.

Giblet

http://groups-beta.google.com/group/Google-Web-Accelerator/browse_thread/thread/6c0290ab558802c4/a63715102e4edbff#a63715102e4edbff

Giblet

daveirl wrote:

This post has been deleted.

That's not the problem, not everyone knows about this and I'd say a few people will get stung.

Giblet

And



This is 1 person who got into all of these accounts.

Nietzschean

Giblet wrote:

http://groups-beta.google.com/group/Google-Web-Accelerator/browse_thread/thread/6c0290ab558802c4/a63715102e4edbff#a63715102e4edbff

i don't see where the p2p stuff mention'd earlier is comming from?


it sounds like a simple bug in the program that some users are getting others previously visited pages....doesn't sound malicious/evil on their part...

google hardly want to cache bbc news's website on their server several million times and so on, its a beta so for this type of technology something like this should be expected imo

Nietzschean

Giblet wrote:

That's not the problem, not everyone knows about this and I'd say a few people will get stung.

For one, as it says on that google fourm, people are given the appearence of being logged in as someone else, but actually arn't as the cookies arn't there for proforming commands.....

So there is the possible risk of someone reading what you viewed, but PM's seems highly unliked as they usually have unique id's so unless someone randomly guessed the id and the page was cached on that google server at the time and bla bla bla... you've about the same odds as google accidently sending you a virus imo

Giblet

They shouldn't release anything that has such stupid problems. Even in Alpha!

Just because they probably didn't know about it, doesn't mean we should all sit down and let GWA it's thing.

So I dunno why you are trying to defend the GWA when it has such a big security hole in it and should be suspended.

And I've also seen the evidence of PM's aswell.

Shrimp

Google are great at thinking of novel ideas.. all of course are going to be in a beta stage for a short while.. give it time, and this will be fixed..

daveirl

This post has been deleted.

Shrimp

how exactly can ppl acess other ppl pm's?

Nietzschean

Giblet wrote:

They shouldn't release anything that has such stupid problems. Even in Alpha!

Software designed to be used by millions of users is very hard to debug before u let anyone test it. and bear in mind this is the TEST phase, if your not comfertable with that then don't use it.

Just because they probably didn't know about it, doesn't mean we should all sit down and let GWA it's thing.

No we tell them and they fix it, sounds like a simple normal proceedure, we didn't all uninstall windows when every security hole was found/exploited now did we?

So I dunno why you are trying to defend the GWA when it has such a big security hole in it and should be suspended.

It should be patched, and as i pointed out in my previous post its not nearly as big a security hole as you are making out.

your inital statement that it involved p2p stuff seems to be completely invalid(privacy agreement has no mention of it either).

And your arguement over PM's seems highly unlikely

Giblet

By checking their own.

Shrimp

sorry? i's lost? can u explain please..

Nietzschean

Giblet wrote:

And I've also seen the evidence of PM's aswell.

Thats a list of PM's, not the PM's themselves, access the PM's would be harder.

you would be relying on the user before you having read the PM and having the right URL still and so on...... I still think the odds of you being able to use it in a malicious fashion to read someone's stuff and post as them is about the same as phpBB screwing up and giving u that access anyway(and it is renounded for its security holes, i didn't see a campain to stop people using that)

Giblet

Unlikely, I just showed you evidence!

Jesus some people are willing to defend anything to the end of the earth. Google know about this, but it seems unlikely they'll do anything soon. And yes, anything that will be snapped up by the masses like GWA will cause major problems with such a security issue. It's not a matter of "proxies do this anyway".

Giblet

Darth Bobo wrote:

Thats a list of PM's, not the PM's themselves, access the PM's would be harder.

you would be relying on the user before you having read the PM and having the right URL still and so on...... I still think the odds of you being able to use it in a malicious fashion to read someone's stuff and post as them is about the same as phpBB screwing up and giving u that access anyway(and it is renounded for its security holes, i didn't see a campain to stop people using that)

So getting a list of PM's is ok? The url would be some simple lookup that would be the same for anyone. And if it used any sort of system to trace PM's it could be easily abused.

radiospan

Shrimp wrote:

sorry? i's lost? can u explain please..

If you go to check your PMs on boards, say, you go to this site: http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/private.php?

The Google WebAccelerator would then cache this page (with all your private info on it).

Then if somebody else goes to check theirs, (using that same URL), Google WebAccelerator checks it's cache finds the copy of *your* private messages page, and displays it on the other persons PC.

At least I think this is what the problem is. Can't believe Google missed something as obvious as this...

Nietzschean

Giblet wrote:

So getting a list of PM's is ok? The url would be some simple lookup that would be the same for anyone.

Yeah a list of pm's seems harmless enough to me, its not actually google's fault imo, i'd say its phpBB's poor security, it should be expiring the pages so google doesn't cache them anyway. it shouldn't cache personal pages on your local machine(think internet cafe), i think its more google has highlighted a flaw in phpbb than vice versa

Nietzschean

plazzTT wrote:

If you go to check your PMs on boards, say, you go to this site: http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/private.php?

Have you checked does it happen for boards.ie ? all the examples stated seem to be confiend to phpBB and its crap security

Giblet

boards.us uses phpbb.

zAbbo

shut up paulie

Giblet

no u

daveirl

This post has been deleted.

Nietzschean

Giblet wrote:

boards.us uses phpbb.

well phpbb is known to be crap for security so unless its appearing in a decent BB i think its a phpBB issue not a google one.

Mutant_Fruit

Erm, i wouldn't call it a trivial bug... its quite possible that confidential info COULD leak out due to this "trivial" bug. Fine, at the moment it seems to be just accounts for web forums... but supposing someones paypal info got "cached" and read by someone else because it was in an email in their email address, or in a PM.... not good.

(i don;t know the likelihood of it happening, but if it did.....)

lomb

paypal info wont cache as it would be https.
in any case i have tried it and web pages actually load slower regardless of what it says at the top. saved 1.2 minutes yeah right. i have uninstalled it, the iol cache thing is very good alright.