Re:Chrome's geolocation fails daily due to API limit
by londons_explore on Wednesday August 09, 2017 @08:20AM
(#14967829)
The API key built into Chrome isn't exactly super secure - anyone can reverse engineer the binary to extract it.
One might imagine that an evil user has done exactly that, and started sending billions of requests to the API, exhausting the quota.
It is better to have the quota exhaust, effectively blocking all Chrome users, than have the service fail due to overload which would block all users (for example, maps.google.com, and iOS and Android)
The long term fix is probably to issue temporary per-user keys to each signed in user, so that anyone who misuses the key will only block themselves. Since Chrome allows non-signed in users, there will be considerable complexity and difficulty with that approach.
One might imagine that an evil user has done exactly that, and started sending billions of requests to the API, exhausting the quota.
It is better to have the quota exhaust, effectively blocking all Chrome users, than have the service fail due to overload which would block all users (for example, maps.google.com, and iOS and Android)
The long term fix is probably to issue temporary per-user keys to each signed in user, so that anyone who misuses the key will only block themselves. Since Chrome allows non-signed in users, there will be considerable complexity and difficulty with that approach.