Posted by
ryuzaki0
on from the do-it-yourself-toll-gate dept.
MC68040 writes "The guy at this site managed to build something together that's actually quite neat in the way he built it, all hand-crafted system that uses a linux box to unlock his door. Maybe not the coolest of solutions, but actually a pretty good idea as for security in my humble opinion."
Slashdot really, truly, utterly needs to have a local cache of the pages it references. It's getting to where Slashdotting is as bad as a denial of service attack - and that's a terrible thing to inflict on *anyone*.
Slashdot should cache pages to prevent the Slashdot Effect!
Sure, it's a great idea, but it has a lot of implications. For example, commercial sites rely on their banner ads to generate revenue. If I cache one of their pages, this will mess with their statistics, and mess with their banner ads. In other words, this will piss them off.
Of course, most of the time, the commercial sites that actually have income from banner ads easily withstand the Slashdot Effect. So perhaps we could draw the line at sites that don't have ads. They are, after all, much more likely to buckle under the pressure of all those unexpected hits. But what happens if I cache the site, and they update themselves? Once again, I'm transmitting data that I shouldn't be, only this time my cache is out of date!
I could try asking permission, but do you want to wait 6 hours for a cool breaking story while we wait for permission to link someone?
So the quick answer is: "Sure, caching would be neat." It would make things a lot easier when servers go down, but it's a complicated issue that would need to be thought through in great detail before being implemented.
They could easily implement some kind of opt-in thing where you put a META tag in your web page telling Slashdot that you grant them explicit permission to mirror the site for (say) a week after mentioning it - so Slashdot would have no legal/copyright come-backs.
You're a genius! Oh...wait...no... You just haven't read the FAQ:
Is it possible to have META tags that Slashdot looks for in a story link before allowing it to be submitted/posted? Many times a server can't handle the load of a Slashdotting. So can the site have tags to prevent it from being added to a Slashdot story?
Not inconceivable, but I don't really think it's worth the work. Most of the sites that are Slashdotted are prepared for it, and the sites that get smashed usually are caught completely off guard; they wouldn't know of this mysterious opt-out meta tag. (See also Caching Slashdot Stories).
It's not rocket science to configure Apache to handle a Slashdotting. I've been hit three times in the past five years. Every time, my little 333MHz eMachine has done just fine. I just followed the instructions in the Apache guide. This guy took another fine route -- he took his pages off-line for the time being. Either route works.
People who put up websites should recognize that people are going to look at it. Sometimes, a lot of people might look at it, as a result of a link from Slashdot or any of hundreds of other sites. People who bitch and moan about being linked to from Slashdot remind me of the companies who whine when people link to "confidential" webpages -- guess what, if it's on the web, it's not confidential.
Slashdot Mirror
I was just reading about barcodes the other day...
Check out This if you are interested.
The cache is useless because it's a page of images which are being loaded from the guys web server.
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
Read the FAQ: They could easily implement some kind of opt-in thing where you put a META tag
in your web page telling Slashdot that you grant them explicit permission to mirror the site for (say) a week after mentioning it - so Slashdot would have no legal/copyright come-backs.
You're a genius! Oh...wait...no... You just haven't read the FAQ
People who put up websites should recognize that people are going to look at it. Sometimes, a lot of people might look at it, as a result of a link from Slashdot or any of hundreds of other sites. People who bitch and moan about being linked to from Slashdot remind me of the companies who whine when people link to "confidential" webpages -- guess what, if it's on the web, it's not confidential.
-Waldo Jaquith