As Larry Ullman says in a few of his great web programming books, there’s no such thing as a “secure” web system, only “more secure” and “less secure”.
What? No love for Jeeves?
I was googling “Patty Duke” when this happened.
There is a good manic-depressive joke in there somewhere.
It’s a good thing I sleep 'til noon. I slept through this whole catastrophe, apparently.
Altavista still exists. Found it through Google.
Warning - doing it live may harm your computer!
You can learn more about what enrages Bill O’Reilly by looking out your window or not having any words on the teleprompter.
Suggestions:
[ul]
[li]Silently ignore the tirade and pretend O’Reilly can keep his cool under unexpected circumstances.[/li][li]Try another pundit for your political commentary.[/li][/ul]
Or you can fuck it and do it live at your own risk.
Here is the official explanation from Google. Some genius added ‘/’ to the bad URLs file. Oops.
This is pure Pointy-Haired-Boss-speak. “Checked in as a value”? “Reverted” a file? These are not the words of a Computer Science PhD. Google is in the hands of third-wavers and Golgafrinchans.
I disagree: It’s the talk of intelligent programmers using a version control system, as opposed to morons trying to manage essential files completely by hand.
Oh right, it’s software revision terminology. My bad.
I would so not want to be the guy that checked that in…
I used to use AskJeeves back in the 90s when they had a great selection of search engines and it got me excellent, or interesting, results every time. And then something happened, some kind of sponsorship shift, and half the good ones were removed and replaced with shitty ones (that have since evaporated completely) and I ran way from it.
I think I changed to Altavista, but that didn’t last long either. It’s all lost in the mists of time, but I seem to recall adopting Google as my default somewhere around mid 2000.
It seems to me that what did all the other search engines in was that they were all focused on getting the user more results. Sure, I can search 15 engines at once, but what good does that do me? If I wasn’t able to find what I was looking for on just, say, an Altavista search, that’s probably not because Altavista didn’t have it in its database, but rather because it was buried too deep in the results. So if you also give me all of the Yahoo results and all of the Lycos results and all of the whatever-all-else results too, then my problem is just going to get worse, not better. Google was (and is) the only one who seems to have prioritized the relevance of the results, rather than just their sheer number, so with a Google search, I usually will find what I’m looking for in the first page, or often even the first link.
I would. How many people can say they took down google for nearly an hour? It was a mistake. What they gonna do, ban him from the fooseball table and take away his Swedish masseuse?
I may be wrong, but this is what I interpret the geek-speek to mean.
“Checked in as a value:” In the list of bad URLs, someone entered another one, but instead of an address like “http://badware.dontgothere.com”, he entered “/” by mistake. Every time a search list came up, it is compared with the bad list before handing the results to the customers. The “/” was considered a wild card and it matched EVERY URL that it was compared to, generating the warnings.
“/ expands to all files:” “/” is used as a wild card to match everything.
“Reverted a file:” When the problem was pinpointed, the latest version of the file of bad names was wiped out and replaced with the previous version, which did not include the “/” that was causing the trouble. The master list reverted to a known-good list.
“We push these updates in a staggered and rolling fashion:” Google is an enormous company with unbelievable amounts of data stored and transmitted. Duplicate master lists of all kinds are stored in thousands of locations world-wide so requests don’t all have to access one central server. When they update the master list, they spread out the updates over time so they don’t all get sent at once. This necessarily means that problems don’t all start at once worldwide, but they don’t all get fixed at once, either.
The interesting thing is that to prevent this from happening in the future, all Google has to do is a simple routine that checks all added values to the bad list and prevents entry of “/” as a single item. Whoever programmed the routine in the first place overlooked that possibility, just like Microsoft programmers overlook thousands of potential buffer overruns and other simple ways to defeat the system.
At least they’ll have sanitized telephones and nice fresh haircuts.
How would this work to disseminate information?
When I go to Google, I ask it for links on something of interest to me – Google doesn’t just send me information it (or the government) wants me to know.
This seems a bit tending toward a tin-hat conspiracy theory.
I thought he was looking for something like this.
Google often has graphics and anouncements on their main page. They could have an anouncement saying “we don’t want to alarm you but China and the USA are at war so it is recommended you go get enough groceries for a month”.