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.
I'm seeing lots of concerns about GWA and privacy in the blogosphere:...
Tracked: May 09, 21:42