Microsoft Employee Allegedly Hacked AltaVista

An anonymous reader writes "Seattle PI has a story about Microsoft employee who worked on the MSN Search initiative having allegedly broken into AltaVista computers and stolen prorietary technology. However, the illegal break-in happened before he was hired by Microsoft. The question is, did Microsoft know anything about it? How much code was being written into MSN Search?"

Comments

Bandwidth Wasting?

[KrisHolland]

"...it's done about 4.5GB of traffic on my site because it's downloading large videos!"

Is there any way to prevent people from using up your bandwidth like this? What if someone continually and purposefully downloads the same file over and over again just to be an idiot?

This seems similar to the hot linking problem, where people link to your images and content from their website so your website gets the bandwidth bill. Has anyone successfully sued over this yet?

Re:Bandwidth Wasting?

[Noksagt]

You can prevent robots (such as the MS Search bot) from doing this by prohibiting them from getting these files with your robots.txt file.

As for individuals, you can limit from IP addresses or add a bandwidth throttling/limiting module to Apache or have all downloads through cgi/php/servlets that are able to track useage.

The real question is if MS search is actually doing anything with those large movies. Perhaps instead of having it retrieve whitelisted filetypes, MS has it retrieve EVERYTHING or isn't using a blacklist big enough