Wednesday, May 4, 2005
Google accellerator is a lightweight (but scary) anonymizer tooPolymorf sez,
Google has just released their own web accelerator. Coming from a third world country, it has at least doubled my web browsing speed. Basically, it works by proxying all traffic, except personal/dynamic stuff, through their servers. The undocumented benefit is that, by using their accelerator service, they are unintentionally offering users an anonymous proxy. Looking through my http logs, instead of seeing my home address (In Grenada, West Indies), I see google address space (undef.net 64.233.173.74 - - [04/May/2005:20:05:06 -0700] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 200 870 "http://undef.net/~ss7/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; en) Opera 8.0")Well, yes, but of course you're not anonymous to Google, which knows about your search history (if you've got cookies on), your email address (if you register for Groups, etc), your friends (if you use Orkut), your email (if you use gmail), and even has your credit card (if you use AdWords or Answers). Anonymity from everyone except Google is nice, but it's not really anonymity, given how easy it would be to subpoena information from them (everyone knows where Google is), and given how much info this allows Google to collect and correlate on you.Not only has google expedited my web browsing, but additionally given me anonymous proxying, which usually slowed down browsing by orders of magnitude.
This is an amazing service, without a doubt -- I'll use it for lightweight proxy-evasion, etc, but caveat surfer. It would be great to see Google setting up a Tor node with similar resources to this, though, and enabling some more robust anonymity.
Link
(Thanks, Polymorf!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:52:41 PM
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