Sunday, August 24, 2008

If you have your own blog site, you should read this

Long title, not snappy and pithy, but if you have a blog that's not hosted (e.g. foo.blogspot.com), the password protection for your site may not work:
It's one of the simplest hacks we've seen in a long time, and the more elite computer users have known about it for a while, but it's still kinda cool and just a little bit unnerving: A hacker has revealed a way to use Google and other search engines to gain unauthorized access to password-protected content on a dizzying number of websites.
Basically the problem is with something called "cloaking" - if you don't have a "hidden, password protected" part of the site, you are probably OK. If you do - say, a member's forum, then all of the content may be showing up in Google's cache.

And no, this isn't Google being evil, it's Google doing what it does.

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