I am almost more interested in the process issues than the technical glitch...
A recent bug in Google Apps allowed students at several colleges to read each other's email messages and some were even able to see another student's entire inbox. The issue occurred at a small handful of colleges, admitted Rajen Sheth, senior product manager for Google Apps, but he declined to say how many other institutions were affected. However, according to Donald Tom, director of IT for support services at Brown University, one of the institutions undergoing the transition, he got the impression that a total of 10 schools faced the problem.Also found on Slashdot.
While the glitch itself was minor and was fixed in a few days, the real concern - at least at Brown - was with how Google handled the situation. Without communicating to the internal IT department, Google shut down the affected accounts, a decision which led to a heated conversation between school officials and the Google account representative.
Link: New York Times: Whoops! Students 'Going Google' Get to Read Each Other's Emails >
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- 2
Dennis Ellison | 9/21/2009 12:03:09 PM
Like Google but sometimes you get what you pay for...
- 3
Christopher Byrne http://www.controlscaddy.com/ | 9/21/2009 4:12:05 PM
I actually just spent the last couple of hours writing a a governance/process post on this story at { Link } before I saw your post via Craig Schumann...
- 4
Vaughan Rivett http://www.vaughanrivett.co.nz | 9/22/2009 4:27:06 AM
This confirms one of my biggest concerns when it comes to cloud based computing. You have not control over security.
- 5
Mike Brown http://www.browniesblog.com | 9/22/2009 7:33:42 AM
You don't have control over *anything* is the point here. You sit and spin. And you tell your users to sit and spin too; that's if you can even call them *your* users any more.
Cheers,
- Mike
I remember a similar bug waaaaaaayyyyyyyy back when I worked at Prodigy (mid 90's) when a programmer slipped in a login routine without proper testing. Under very limited circumstances (e.g. visiting a particular section of the service) allowed that person to view the bill of another person. That was a "fun" day of trouble-shooting.