[3562] in WWW Security List Archive
Re: Alta Vista may or may not harvest unadvertised documents
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jacob Rose)
Sat Nov 16 07:27:13 1996
Date: Sat, 16 Nov 1996 04:49:43 -0500 (EST)
From: Jacob Rose <jacob@whiteshell.com>
To: "David M. Chess" <CHESS@watson.ibm.com>
Cc: www-security@ns2.rutgers.edu
In-Reply-To: <199611151939.OAA628437@mailhub1.watson.ibm.com>
Errors-To: owner-www-security@ns2.rutgers.edu
> But not as a *security* measure, of course! If an attacker wants
> to ignore robots.txt, he certainly will. *8) And I wouldn't
> want to have my security depend on Alta Vista (or anyone else
> non-malicious) having no bugs in their robots.txt interpreter...
Perzactly; as an information consumer, I want AltaVista to be as agressive
as possible, so that it will locate badly publicized files and catalog
them. That's its job! If I don't want it to catalog particular of *my*
files and it does, then I haven't done *my* job right.
I wouldn't dream of complaining to AltaVista; I'd fix the problem by
relocating the files and making sure it wouldn't happen again. I'd learn
a lesson, not point fingers.
I would certainly be just as agressive if I were looking for information.
When my Web page designer hat is on, I often rummage around interesting
pages (or ones that I think have bugs the owners should know about) to see
what's going on. I often truncate the URL and see if the directory is
indexable. That's just me doing *my* job.
Jacob Rose The price and the cost of automobile
jacob@whiteshell.com travel are two very different values.
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