Re: Something's amiss at AltaVista...

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From: Kragen Sitaker (kragen@pobox.com)
Date: Mon Nov 27 2000 - 10:14:23 PST


Jeff Barr writes:
> It seems as if they are requesting documents from my site
> that are valid on other sites. I say sites because the variety
> of file names that it is looking for are too diverse for me
> to believe that they are all from the same site.

Very interesting.

Suppose you want to write a computer program to guess somebody's
password. They won't tell you the password, so you have to guess at
it. If you have a long list of passwords other people have used,
sorted by frequency, guessing the top few of those seems like a
reasonable first cut.

Suppose you want to write a computer program to find documents on
someone's web site. Some of the documents may not be linked, so you
have to guess at valid localparts of URLs. If you have a long list of
localparts other sites have used, sorted by frequency, guessing the top
few of those seems like a reasonable first cut.

Or maybe it's just a bug.

-- 
<kragen@pobox.com>       Kragen Sitaker     <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/>
Perilous to all of us are the devices of an art deeper than we possess
ourselves.
       -- Gandalf the White [J.R.R. Tolkien, "The Two Towers", Bk 3, Ch. XI]


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