fantomNews™ — the ultimate know

(rt) Seeing how furiously the outcry against Google’s beta release of Web Accelerator (GWA) hit the Net in the past week (even furnishing our own site with record traffic spikes), the established media have now chimed in across the board, so we see no more need to report on the general picture here. Nevertheless, we will, of course, continue to update our recommendations on blocking this unscrupulous piese of spyware:

However, while that is what we focused on ourselves, it’s not only about bandwidth piracy, privacy issues, copyright infringement contentions and general policy anxiety either: Tons of reports have sketched Google’s GWA as arguably being, beta or not, one of the buggiest pieces of software ever unlashed upon the unsuspecting general public. Browser crashes galore, deleted cache content with massive loss of data, display of other people’s login pages, broken links, failing downloads, blocked site access, minute-to-non-existent performance improvement (officially the GWA’s only raison d’etre, after all …) the list goes on and on.

Now most of it is official, as eWeek’s author Matt Hicks reports on Yahoo!:

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.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company has stopped caching pages from those sites, said Marissa Mayer, Google’s director of consumer Web.

But expectably, the company’s trying to shift the blame to everyone else but themselves, claiming a) that “It is an unfortunate problem, but it looks worse than it is” (Google’s Marissa Mayer), and b) that the sites involved were not compliant with accepted technical standards. However, this stance seems to address only a fraction of the problems reported to date.

UK programmer Mike Rumble sums up the prevailing attitude best: “Google Web Accelerator appears to be a poorly executed, potentially destructive product.”

The uber geeks over at → Slashdot aren’t too amused either, one assessment culminating in the statement:

It is still Google’s fault. Any half-competent software engineer would have thought about this, and the people at Google did not. It doesn’t matter if the websites affected were non compliant to the RFC, because they were the existing state of affairs. Google stuck this crap out there with no thought for the existing state of affairs […]

Google’s self-gratulatory and potentially empty promises notwithstanding, we strongly recommend you to continue the fight and express your concerns by featuring and spreading one or both of the graphics we had designed and put in the public domain for this purpose:

You read our initial take here:

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