GamersCircle

Right before he clicked on the “upload” button, the person at Google who put the Web Accelerator online probably took a nice big swig from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. Why must this be, having not been in the room and having no evidence to prove so? Because no rational human being could have posted this program without needing to steady himself, preparing for the storm that was to come.

You thought Autolink and Desktop Search and Gmail were bad? You ain’t seen nothing yet.

Yesterday, Google released perhaps its most controversial product ever: The Google Web Accelerator. Its a simple product, one that promises to speed up your internet connection like many little applications have in the past. It doesn’t seem like much.

Of course, peer a little deeper, and you might even be impressed. The ideas behind Web Accelerator are pretty nice, smart enough to be worthy of a Googler’s 20% time. Google has essentially decided to make “an extra copy” of the entire World Wide Web (or at least the HTML and images of it) and let you run it off their servers, because Google’s servers are always faster (Blogger and Orkut aside, of course).

Dig even deeper and the picture grows to reveal a whole nother world of possibilities. Google is really offering to replace the web, wanting everyone to use their copy instead of the public copy. While the World Wide Web is currently a decentralized network of worldwide servers, Google wants the whole web to run off its computers, in one of its anonymous, nondescript data centers.

Look just a bit deeper and the picture becomes a bit murky. If you run the web off Google’s computers, then Google knows everything you do. It reads every page you read, every email you write and send, and sees every bit of pervertedness you look at. Google has complete control of your web, and the freedom to change it as it sees fit, if it ever decides to. More importantly, Google can keep a record of everything you do, information that could prove quite valuable.

Now, pull out your microscopes. That murkiness? It’s not confusion, or paranoia. No, your internet just got a little darker, because someone has decided to crap on it.

See, Google isn’t serving web pages faster, its serving other people’s versions of the web page faster. What does that mean? Try using Web Accelerator on a forum site, one with lots of geeks who love Google and probably already have Web Accelerator installed. Why, if you’re lucky, you’ll be logged in as someone else, as the folks at SomethingAwful.com discovered. The posters in that forum discovered that most of the times they refreshed the page, they were logged in as a different person, seeing their friend’s control panel for the forums.

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