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Seeing Others' Computers With Google Desktop Search
from the bug...-or-feature? dept
Someone who prefers to remain anonymous writes "You can search the hard drives of other computers on your network with Google's new desktop search. I followed the instructions on the site and I was able to search through my roommate's computer. Quite a scary bug in one of Google's fastest growing programs." The question, though, is whether this is a bug or an undocumented feature? While it is a bit worrisome if there are unknown users on your network, in a case where you control the network, it would be very useful to have the simple ability to Google search across other computers on the network from a single machine. In the meantime, this hack doesn't work on machines that have a firewall, and if you don't have a firewall, you're already asking for trouble. Anyway, it's likely that Google will fix this soon and, bug or feature, it will be a thing of the past.
3 Comments | Leave a Comment..
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Not an attack
Duh.
If I can install software on your computer, all bets are off. Google has done nothing wrong here, and in fact, they've done a reasonably good job of preventing remote exploitation of GDS.
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but if you try this...
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Re: Not an attack
Odds are plenty of people will install it on their own. Removes that tricky first step.
just my $0.02 (Canadian, before taxes)
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