Tribal Instinct

Blocking Google Web Accelerator

Google launched their Web Accelerator yesterday which has raised some eyebrows in the webmaster and privacy worlds although it does offer a helpful web acceleration tool. Google’s Web Accelerator is not only serving pages faster, sources report that it’s serving the wrong web pages to the wrong people – that is, someone using Google’s Accelerator saw they were logged into a forum under some other username.

Since such activity could pose both a security risk to web surfers and site owners, there are some web sites which are interested in not having Web Accelerator pick up their material. Nick at ThreadWatch picked up on a code which blocks Google Web Accelerator on one’s site because of such reasons. Here’s the scoop from FantoMaster : A very fast and efficacious method of denying Google Web Accelerator (GWA) funneled traffic access to your web site is blocking the IPs it is calling your pages from.

The current GWA IPs are allocated to the following IP range: 72.14.192.0 – 72.14.192.255

The best procedure for Linux/Unix systems is working with the .htaccess file and Apache’s module mod_rewrite.

For this to work, the following server configuration is required:

* Apache web server with module mod_rewrite installed.
* .htaccess functionality enabled.

If you don’t know whether these requirements are fulfilled please ask your system administrator – provided he or she
knows. They really should, but unfortunately some plain do not …
The .htaccess File

For the mod_rewrite technique to work, you will need to upload a file named .htaccess (please note the period/dot “.” at the beginning of the file name!) to your server’s HTML directory.

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