The intersting thing is to whom you compromise your privacy. Use a bank account, and you tell your bank about your money. Use an ISP and you tell that isp about what you look at on the web. Etc.
Now, read a page on the web, you tell DoubleClick about that! As I see it, compromising your privacy to someone you do business with is no concern, giving out the details to some third party is.
There was the project Harwest a while ago, not sure what came out of it (a search revealed this document seems sane and not much more than a year old).
The basic idea was that the pages are indexed locally at the server, and indexed data are gatherad and can be queried at "brokers".
Calm down now... Free speach does not imply that threats and libel (1) is legal. I'm all for free speach (and free beer:) but if someone threatens / libels me, I take action.
Heres the mail John Vranesevich says he sent to Harward. If this mail is what made Harward close the site, then I'm all on Vranesevich's side. The important thing to remember, though, is we don't know!
Greetings:
May I first say that I did my best to see that this letter got sent to the appropriate individuals. I had some difficulty determining who those individuals may be, so if I have made an error, I would greatly appreciate it if you would forward this letter on to the appropriate individual(s).
My name is John Vranesevich, and I am the Founder and General Partner of AntiOnline LLP, a computer security company based outside of Pittsburgh, PA.
Earlier today, one of my colleagues forwarded me the following URL:
http://packetstorm.harvard.edu/jp/
Needless to say, I was shocked and outraged at what I saw. This page contains a large archive of libelous and, to put it bluntly, sick material. Everything from archives of copyrighted material from our website, to altered pictures of my family, to 'stories' about me which contain images ranging from people engaged in homosexual activities, to a nun that appears to be covered in seminal fluid.
I am astounded that an institution as prestigious Harvard would be party to the dissemination of this type of material. It is my hope that the University Administration was unaware of this site, and now that it has been brought to their attention, it is my hope that it will be dealt with promptly.
I have worked to help several educational institutions develop 'Acceptable Use Policies', and if Harvard is similar to them, the above URL would be a clear violation of that policy.
It is my hope that the above mentioned domain will be shut down immediately, and that the individual responsible will be seriously reprimanded.
I hope to hear from you soon about this matter, and what you may have done regarding it.
Yours In CyberSpace, John Vranesevich Founder, AntiOnline
(1) English is not my first language, so I'm sorry if this is the right word, what I mean is e.g. publishes fake porn images of me.
Yes, to get good websites (which my personal site isn't, since I play to much with it; but I think other sites I edit ( example (in swedish)) is) you should edit them by hand, use a validator and look at them through many different UAs.
Helpful management stuff include:
CVS lets you keep track of who canges what, and why.
find web/docroot -name \*.html -exec nsgmls -s {} \; Quickly and simply validates your whole site.
The one thing that isn't covered by this is a way to check all links in a site with a quick and easy command. I haven't really looked hard for this, but I hope to find time to eihter go find something or write it myself...
Your favorite editor, Emacs, has a really good HTML mode and can load / save files transparently through ftp, just by typing the ftp URL when opening a file. Even file-name completion works just as if the file had been local.
The main reason to break up Microsoft (as far as I have heard) would be to have fair competition in the applications, not the OS.
I.e. Microsoft would be split into one company making only operating systems and one or more companies making applications. After that, the company making Word wouldn't be able to compete unfairly to e.g. Corel (making Word Perfect).
The result of this would be that there's still only one Windows-company, but fair competition among the applications. This would then lead to better competition among operating systems (since the companies making the bestselling applications wouldn't give preferential treatment to Windows).
True, Linux (or FreeBSD, which I happen to preffer) is not really in the high end. Neiter is Microsoft. They should try to compare themself to a good system from SGI, Digital (compaq) or Sun.
The good thing here is that those "real" high-end servers run Un*x. There is alomost complete source-code comatibility (meaning you can just type make in most cases) from Linux / *BSD to those systems.
Slashdot Mirror
Now, read a page on the web, you tell DoubleClick about that! As I see it, compromising your privacy to someone you do business with is no concern, giving out the details to some third party is.
The basic idea was that the pages are indexed locally at the server, and indexed data are gatherad and can be queried at "brokers".
Heres the mail John Vranesevich says he sent to Harward. If this mail is what made Harward close the site, then I'm all on Vranesevich's side. The important thing to remember, though, is we don't know!
(1) English is not my first language, so I'm sorry if this is the right word, what I mean is e.g. publishes fake porn images of me.
Helpful management stuff include:
Quickly and simply validates your whole site.
The one thing that isn't covered by this is a way to check all links in a site with a quick and easy command. I haven't really looked hard for this, but I hope to find time to eihter go find something or write it myself ...
Your favorite editor, Emacs, has a really good HTML mode and can load / save files transparently through ftp, just by typing the ftp URL when opening a file. Even file-name completion works just as if the file had been local.
I.e. Microsoft would be split into one company making only operating systems and one or more companies making applications. After that, the company making Word wouldn't be able to compete unfairly to e.g. Corel (making Word Perfect).
The result of this would be that there's still only one Windows-company, but fair competition among the applications. This would then lead to better competition among operating systems (since the companies making the bestselling applications wouldn't give preferential treatment to Windows).
The good thing here is that those "real" high-end servers run Un*x. There is alomost complete source-code comatibility (meaning you can just type make in most cases) from Linux / *BSD to those systems.