Two days ago, the first Israeli Google Developer Day was held. It was a colorful and interesting event, to the best of google tradition.
Yesterday, all attendees got an email saying that an unauthorized network activity was detected.
“We identified unauthorised activity on the public wired Ethernet network which was provided by the convention centre for conference attendees to access the Internet.”
Beside the interesting lectures there were two code-labs or hackathons going on. The first thing that came to my mind when I saw everyone are connecting their laptops, wirelly and wirelessly, is that someone will abuse this for some king of Man in the middle attack. But for some reason I thought that since it’s google, they won’t let something like this to happen.
Just minutes before, I asked the google experts over there, which are very nice and professional in there own fields, about the GMail Frame Injection issue. I wasn’t accusing anyone just trying to raise a discussion about it. It seemed that no one knew about it and no one really cared. The suggestion I got was that I should report this somewhere in the GMail website. But, it’s already been reported, I protested.
I should have understood by this, that security isn’t the first priority of these uber geeks.
Maybe we’re expecting too much from google, they’re just the greatest company they’re not gods.
Anyhow I wasn’t hurt by this since I don’t transfer sensitive non encrypted data in these kind of places. And it might be that google is just covering themselves just in case someone got hurt. And most users weren’t really affected.
On a side note, I’ve allowed myself to “analyze” the google dev crowd, I’d expected them to be in higher level then, for example, the Microsoft crowd.
Indeed, in a rough inclusion, the google crowd is much geekier and also much more nerdish, as opposed to the Microsoft crowd, especially here in Israel :D. It can be said that MS is much more approachable and that they create tools that anyone can use, or that MS is aiming to the lowest common denominator, or that everything is political. I don’t care. All I know is that I don’t feel belonging to any of these. The google crowd is too smart nerdish and MS crowd is too… how to say it politely… too stupid common.
I’m somewhere in the creative outskirt, I’m in the Flash crowd 🙂
P.C. Not that it’s anything wrong about it to be a common .Net developer, a lot of my best friends are .Net developers 😉