Google Web Accelerator 2.0...Shadier than Ever

Oct
24

The Google Web Accelerator is back with a vengeance

In version 1.0, web masters at least had a fighting chance as the GWA identified its requests with a “X-moz: prefetch” header (as prescribed by Mozilla). Sure, everyone in the world had to change their web applications to fit Google’s vision of a perfect world, but at least they could.

Not so for version 2.0 of this virus. It ships with a brand new mutation: The header is gone! There’s now no way to identify a pre-fetch from a regular request, which means that it’s no longer possible to block the GWA.

David at 37 Signals said it only took 2 minutes after his post for Google to remove the tool, but the download page just worked for me.

Evil. Evil. Evil. etc

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