Dean Whitbread 2020
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Somebody apparently logged in to the blog which I run from my Blogger / Google account which controls the John Cleese podcast and made a post entitled “1238807249657” with the text of the post: “eeyore is cute!”
This was pointed out to me on Twitter by @lozzykinz, a fan of John’s, who saw the RSS appear on John’s Ning community page and was confused by it enough to contact me and ask what it meant. It’s five entries down on the left hand column.
When I clicked the link http://www.johncleesepodcast.co.uk/cleeseblog/2009/04/1238807249657.html it revealed a page which takes a long time to load, made at 1:04 am April 4th 2009, and I noticed that an address was being called which I traced back to Google using Network Utility:
0.blogger_loadtest.server.blogger.gg.borg.google.com
It’s a real server on Google’s domain.
Now, I haven’t given anyone access to my account, nor have I accessed it from an insecure place – I’m behind two firewalls. As far as I know the password hasn’t been compromised (it’s now changed) and I am the sole author on this blog.
The post doesn’t show up in the list of posts internally:
Did Google really gatecrash John Cleese’s podcast, and my account, to run some kind of server test? If they did, it represents a gross breach of trust. It’s also incredible that they didn’t know it would leave an RSS trail and be visible, but I am guessing that’s what happened.
I am not holding my breath for an explanation from Google, who from experience are quite unwilling to admit any mistakes and do not provide adequate mechanisms for redress (search their “help” which provides very restricted means to actual email contact.)
I will certainly change the hosting for this podcast in the immediate future.
UPDATE: It was a test that went wrong (according to Blogger)
Still, not good, and makes me feel very insecure about using Blogger as a host for clients.