Randy Charles Morin blogs for the sake of blogging.
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37Signals: Google has reintroduced their Google Web Accelerator with a vengeance. It was evil enough the first time around, but this time it’s downright scary.
Randy: The Google Web Accelerator download seems to be down. The 37Signals author posted that it was taken down only minutes after he posted it. Could have been a caching or proxy issue or bad deployment at Google. I'm a little worried about this. It's entirely not possible to do one-click subscription for RSS when Web Accelerator is hanging out. It'll have to be 2-click subscription, the second click to confirm your humanity. That'll mean some changes to R|mail.
There's one part of Web Accelerator that I've always feared and that's inadvertent clicks by the end-user. Image if you using a Web mailer and you get SPAM. Not hard to image, that's a large fraction of the Internet users. Those SPAMmers will now put links in your emails that effectively act as a ping, telling them that somebody just read their email. Helping SPAMmers figure out which email accounts are actively read doesn't sound like a good idea. Now, use your imagination and figure out what else will be done with this security hole.
Randy
Randy