Bane Macleod

Google Web Accelerator

Special note to those using Google Web Accelerator.

You will notice absolutely no difference when surfing this site with the accelerator running as I have blocked it from working on this server. The application is of questionable worth at any rate and has been noted to slow down some connections dramatically. Basically what the application does is provide a view of any web page that you are looking at from googles web servers rather than from the actual server that you are viewing. This operates on the assumption that googles servers are fast, therefore you get the (cached) information faster. While this seems to be a great idea in theory, in practice this means any content you look at is now deposited directly to googles servers. Before you gasp at the horror of your latest porn splurge being noticed by google engineers, consider that your email, private messages, admin panels, etc.. will be cached as well.

In some cases this is leading to errors as extreme as being logged in as another user on a forum. For more on the reasons why I took this particular action feel free to look at this particular article.

To learn how to block this on your server/site check this post here. If you are not using the correct headers in your site I would strongly advise blocking this application until it is a little more ironed out.. I would also suggest not using it to log on to admin pages, personal areas, private messages, etc, etc.. so on and so on...