************************************************************** * * * 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: * * * * * ************************************************************** "You've been reading some old letters You smile & think how much you changed." -- "This Is The Day" from the album /Soul Mining/ 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