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*                                                            *
*                         CYBERSPACE                         *
*         A biweekly column on net culture appearing         *
*                in the Toronto Sunday Sun                   *
*                                                            *
* Copyright 1999 Karl Mamer                                  *
* Free for online distribution                               *
* All Rights Reserved                                        *
* Direct comments and questions to:                          *
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*                                                            *
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"You've been reading some old letters 
You smile & think how much you changed."

-- "This Is The Day" from the album /Soul MMining/ 
by The The 

One of the biggest mistakes newbies make is assuming the net 
offers the kind of anonymity provided by large crowds or 
cities. The net makes it easy to blend in but it offers 
a wicked set of search tools that make it easy to blend 
you out.

A few months ago, I found one of my co-workers in the lunch 
room tearing mailing labels off magazines. She was 
graciously supplementing the periodical selection with back 
issues from home. She carefully removed each mailing label 
in case some co-worker took an unwanted fancy. Made 
sense. Why make it easy on a stalker? I went back to my desk, 
launched my web browser, punched her name in at 
canada411.sympatico.ca, and to her horror, emailed her her 
home address.

Information wants to be free, but sometimes we don't want 
information to be /that/ free. The pain-in-the-butt factor has, 
until recently, protected us from associates poking about our 
public records in the same manner a guest might poke 
through your bathroom medicine cabinet.

Consider Deja News (www.dejanews.com). Deja News lets 
you search a database of nearly every message posted to 
net.news since 1995. Did you tell a tasteless joke on 
alt.humor back in January 1996? What happens if five years 
from now you run for political office and your opponents go 
raking through Deja News and discover it? Okay, most of us 
will never run for public office, but we all apply for jobs. 
What happens if your prospective employer decides to see 
what you've been up to on net.news and doesn't like your 
stand on the abortion issue or doesn't like your choice in pizza toppings?

Fortunately Deja News and other net.news databases provide 
a way to keep your messages from being archived by placing 
"x-no-archive: yes" on the first line of your post. Bots that 
convert the news spool to a searchable database will ignore 
any messages with that line.

Web builders should also be concerned about their once and 
future words. An organization called The Internet Archive 
(www.archive.org) has embarked on the mind numbing task 
of, essentially, making a regular back up of the entire 
Internet.

"Remember the burning of the Library of Alexandria" seems 
to be the group's rallying cry. The goal is to provide future 
researchers snap shots of the net's evolution. Like Deja News, 
all sorts of problems spring to mind. Imagine 10 years from 
now your future husband discovers some gushy site you put 
up in tribute to your boyfriend of the present time. "Honey, 
who's Mark? Why have you never mentioned him before..." 
Men can be jerks about stuff like that.

The good people of the Internet Archive are not info fascists, 
however. If you don't want your words to become a permanent 
part the sum total of human knowledge, you can put 
NOINDEX or NOARCHIVE inside your page's  
tag. For example . Other search engines, 
like HotBot, require a META tag like the one below:



If a page has already been included but sober second though 
makes you think it would be better if future generations didn't 
know about a certain page, search engines like HotBot will 
remove your page if it detects an updated version with the 
NOINDEX tag.

If you prefer to keep search bots out of entire directories, 
you don't have to slap such a tag on every document. You can 
place a document called "robots.txt" in the directory. 
This file will direct a search bot to keep its stinking 
nose out of your business. You can get more information 
on what information should be entered into robots.txt at 
http://info.webcrawler.com/mak/projects/robots/norobots.html

    Source: geocities.com/lapetitelesson/cs/text

               ( geocities.com/lapetitelesson/cs)                   ( geocities.com/lapetitelesson)