Like the author notes, I don't think the problem was with Google. It was no fault of theirs.
The reason: It's a fine line between maintaining privacy policies and managing such events. If google were storing/caching these links, there would have been an outcry from those worried about user privacy and stuff.
About the by-the-hour downloads, well there again is a trade-off between providing data quickly and doing a lazy evaluation.
I think, as the author notes, it was just an unfortunate event that was a consequence of good design decisions gone bad circumstantially and wreaking havoc for the author.
It was certainly nice of Amazon to have made that refund. The resources (read bandwidth) were used after all.
About the by-the-hour downloads, well there again is a trade-off between providing data quickly and doing a lazy evaluation.
I think, as the author notes, it was just an unfortunate event that was a consequence of good design decisions gone bad circumstantially and wreaking havoc for the author.
It was certainly nice of Amazon to have made that refund. The resources (read bandwidth) were used after all.