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Comment Re:Doesn't that kinda defeat the point of the arch (Score 5, Informative) 234

by Arthur Dent '99 (#45415023) Attached to: Britain's Conservatives Scrub Speeches from the Internet

I apologize for my mistake. Until just a few minutes ago, I was unaware that the Internet Archive agrees to RETROACTIVELY honor a robots.txt file. So once a robots.txt file restricts access to content, they voluntarily remove access to previously archived content from the archive. Here's the related item from their FAQ:


Some sites are not available because of robots.txt or other exclusions. What does that mean?

The Internet Archive follows the Oakland Archive Policy for Managing Removal Requests And Preserving Archival Integrity

The Standard for Robot Exclusion (SRE) is a means by which web site owners can instruct automated systems not to crawl their sites. Web site owners can specify files or directories that are disallowed from a crawl, and they can even create specific rules for different automated crawlers. All of this information is contained in a file called robots.txt. While robots.txt has been adopted as the universal standard for robot exclusion, compliance with robots.txt is strictly voluntary. In fact most web sites do not have a robots.txt file, and many web crawlers are not programmed to obey the instructions anyway. However, Alexa Internet, the company that crawls the web for the Internet Archive, does respect robots.txt instructions, and even does so retroactively. If a web site owner decides he / she prefers not to have a web crawler visiting his / her files and sets up robots.txt on the site, the Alexa crawlers will stop visiting those files and will make unavailable all files previously gathered from that site. This means that sometimes, while using the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, you may find a site that is unavailable due to robots.txt (you will see a "robots.txt query exclusion error" message). Sometimes a web site owner will contact us directly and ask us to stop crawling or archiving a site, and we endeavor to comply with these requests. When you come accross a "blocked site error" message, that means that a siteowner has made such a request and it has been honored.

Currently there is no way to exclude only a portion of a site, or to exclude archiving a site for a particular time period only.

When a URL has been excluded at direct owner request from being archived, that exclusion is retroactive and permanent.

Comment Re:Doesn't that kinda defeat the point of the arch (Score 1) 234

by Arthur Dent '99 (#45414757) Attached to: Britain's Conservatives Scrub Speeches from the Internet

The post is misleading. The Conservative website now has a "robots.txt" file which is designed to prevent search engines like the Internet Archive from archiving current and future content. They did not delete previously archived content from the Internet Archive.

Basically, the robots.txt convention is based on politeness. It merely lists directories and files which "honest" search engines agree to not search through. There's nothing actually stopping anyone from ignoring these requests and searching those "disallowed" directories anyway.

Feed Techdirt: CISPA Passes The House, As 288 Representatives Don't Want To Protect Your Privac (techdirt.com)

From feed by feedfeeder
This is not wholly surprising, but after some debate and some half-hearted attempts at pretending they care about the public's privacy rights, the House has passed CISPA, 288 votes against 127. The vote breakdown did not go fully along party lines, though it was clearly Republican driven. 196 Republicans voted for it, while just 29 voted against it (despite numerous conservative groups coming out against the bill). The Democrats split down the middle. 92 Dems voted for it and 98 against. If you compare this to last year, it looks like a lot more Democrats went from opposing to being in favor of trampling your privacy rights. Last year, 140 Dems voted against CISPA and only 42 for it. Either way, this seems like a pretty bi-partisan decision to shaft the American public on their privacy rights. That said, there is still the threat of a Presidential veto (though, with the vote today, the House is close to being able to override a veto). The bigger question is now the Senate, which couldn't agree on a cybersecurity bill last year, and has shown no signs of improvement this year. If you want to protect your privacy, it's time to focus on the Senate, and make sure they know not to pass a privacy-destroying bill like CISPA.

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Businesses

Submission + - Wikipedia COO was Convicted Felon

Submitted by Arthur Dent '99
Arthur Dent '99 writes: According to this AP story, Carolyn Bothwell Doran was COO for the Wikimedia Foundation for six months before it was discovered that she was a convicted felon with charges of theft, drunk driving, and shooting her boyfriend in the chest. Of interest to me is her apparent connection to the CIA; her father was a CIA official, and her late husband was a former CIA officer who drowned on their honeymoon in 1999 (providing plenty of good fodder for conspiracy theorists). The Wikimedia Foundation is now performing background checks on its officers.
Education

Submission + - One Lapdance Per Child

Submitted by Arthur Dent '99
Arthur Dent '99 writes: A reporter from the News Agency of Nigeria has discovered that several primary school children are downloading pornography on the laptops donated by the One Laptop Per Child project. AN OLPC official has stated that the laptops will now be fitted with filters.

I believe that children should indeed be protected from the seedier side of the Internet. My question regards how that filtering will be handled. Are the school districts who receive donated equipment responsible themselves to install and maintain filtering software, or is it the responsibility of the manufacturer to pre-install filtering software on laptops destined for schools? If so, does the school district itself have any way to add and/or remove blacklisted sites from the pre-installed filter?
Announcements

Submission + - Jean Ichbiah, Chief Architect of Ada, Dies

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Jean Ichbiah, the chief architect of the Ada programming language, has died (http://www.adaic.org/news/ichbiah.html). Although Ada is not widely used today outside of DoD, the language introduced a generation of programmers to practical language constructs for what had until then been esoteric features such as overloading, exception handling, and multi-tasking.
Power

Submission + - Affordable Solar Manufacturing Breakthrough

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: International Automated Systems, Inc. (IAUS) has announced that they have set a new production record for solar panel manufacturing, both in speed and in cost. They claim to have manufactured nearly 1,000 Kilowatts of IAUS's solar panels in a short 24-hour run. The IAUS system consists of panels which serve as lenses to focus the sun's heat on a heat exchanger that then produce steam or other high-temperature fluid that is then passed through a simple, patented turbine which is connected to a generator to produce electricity. The company says that they have achieved the milestone of producing electricity via solar energy at a price below wholesale grid pricing.

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