Signal vs. Noise reports how Google is wreaking havoc on their web application product, Backpack, by deleting user pages:
The accelerator scours a page and prefetches the content behind each link. This gives the illusion of pages loading faster (since they’ve already been pre-loaded behind the scenes). Here’s the problem: Google is essentially clicking every link on the page — including links like “delete this” or “cancel that.” And to make matters worse, Google ignores the Javascript confirmations. So, if you have a “Are you sure you want to delete this?” Javascript confirmation behind that “delete” link, Google ignores it and performs the action anyway. Disrespect.
We discovered this yesterday when a few people were reporting that their Backpack pages were “disappearing.” We were stumped until we dug a little deeper and discovered this Web Accelerator behavior. Once we figured this out we added some code to prevent Google from prefetching the pages and clicking the links, but it was quite disconcerting.
Users on the SomethingAwful forums posted screenshots of being logged in on other user accounts. Bad. I’m sure we’ll be hearing more about this.
Sometimes I look at the people around me, and I realize we’re just monkeys wearing clothes. So much of our daily lives revolve around the same things as our presumed primate ancestors. Dominance, competition, hierarchy, sociability, and grooming. We are social animals, and the social element permeates all things. Why do musicians or actors perform? For the love of music or drama? Maybe, but mostly for the love of performance. The desire to be paid attention to. If it was for love of music they would play and listen only for themselves. We live in a social world. Most of our activities engage our social activities: blogging, reading books about fictional others, watching others on television, eating with others. Society has a life of its own and imposes its own order outside the individual. For proof of this, observe how difficult it is to violate fundamental social taboos. Try showing up to work naked, for example. We cannot be true individuals and remain in society. All social groups have their own rules. It’s just a question of which group to belong to.