[3528] in WWW Security List Archive
Re: Alta Vista may or may not harvest unadvertised documents
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (David M. Chess)
Wed Nov 13 14:50:38 1996
Date: Wed, 13 Nov 96 11:09:39 EST
From: "David M. Chess" <CHESS@watson.ibm.com>
To: www-security@ns2.rutgers.edu
Errors-To: owner-www-security@ns2.rutgers.edu
> Regardless of whether the Alta Vista harvester is this aggressive,
> other harvesters (or individual human users) might be, so the prudent
> thing is never to put files in a world-readable web tree that you can't
> afford for the world to see. Other recent RISKS postings include a few
> horror stories on this theme.
As a human user, I'm *definitely* that aggressive when looking for
information (if a URL fails, for instance, I'll often back off one
directory and see if there's anything similar-looking there), and the
one spider that I've written (used only on IBM pages so far; don't
worry!) is optionally that aggressive also. It hadn't occurred to
me that that might be construed as a privacy or security attack or
unsociability. I'm sure it also hasn't occurred to others... *8)
- -- -
David M. Chess |
High Integrity Computing Lab | >> Dry Clean Only <<
IBM Watson Research |
