Google roundup…. 55 ways to have fun, ipv6 and schoolkids Social Security Numbers….
There are a few Google related stories of the last few days to catch up. 1)55 Ways to have fun with Google is an e-book available for purchase on Amazon or Lulu.com, but it’s also avaiable as a free pdf download. (And it’s licensed so you can mix it up/etc…) It’s certainly not as deep as a Google Hacks overview would be, but covers some of the Google games out there and a few other interesting bits as well. It might be a good gift for those just getting their feet wet in Google searching…. 2) There are a couple stories about just how many IPv6 addresses that Google controls these days. From George Ou’s article ” (79 billion billion billion addresses)”…. They’ve been sold that many, really for the main purpose of being an ISP of some sort (maybe selling businesses IPv6 connectivity?)
Of course, stories of the IPv6 address buying, dark fiber and a new datacenter gives visions of a new internet…. let’s call it the Ginternet – owned by google and running IPv6 on all that fiber…. well – surprise – Google is up to something.
3)The Winston-Salem journal has the story of a lawsuit filed by Catawba county schools against Google. Apparently they indexed a page that was supposed to be password protected on the schools servers listing names, grades and social security numbers of students. According to the story, one student had a personal page and “In Google’s effort to get information on her, one of its spiders latched onto her name in this document. We were not aware that password-protected sites are set up like that. To our knowledge, Google could only cache unsecure information that did not require a password or username.”
Something on this sounds peculiar – I suspect there will be more to follow. Either the password authentication was done through parameters passed to a script so the page was linked like this…. myinternalschoolpage.co.us/passwordprotectedpage.html?username=me&&password=billy
Like I say, there’s more to this story. I DOUBT that google is out there brute forcing passwords in their efforts to “gather information” on people.
(It was a Docushare server.)