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Saturday, November 5th, 2005

Google Desktop Malicious Behavior

Dare notes that Google’s Desktop application is acting malicious, hammering rss feeds and scanning your Internet cache for feeds you’ve visited but haven’t configured.

The highlighted requests are requests to URLs of Atom & RSS feeds that were in my browser cache by Google Desktop. I did not configure the application to fetch these feeds. So not only does Google Desktop flood websites with feed requests in a manner bordering on the behavior of a malicious application, it also does this automatically without the end user explicitly subscribing to the feed.

That’s messed up.

Personally I haven’t installed the app on my desktop and having read Dare’s report, probably never will. But I wonder what else this software is doing that could be considered questionable? Poking around under the hood of this app might make an interesting project.