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White House Secrecy Fetish
Feb. 25th, 2005 04:56 pmPerhaps this will be of interest only to techies, but I think it is yet another indication of the Bush administration's intense desire to control information. Even when it really can't.
What's up? Well, the white house web site (http://www.whitehouse.gov) has been set up to prevent internet search service indexing of lots of its content. I don't know exactly what percentage. Perhaps someone will tally that up eventually. One does this via a file called robots.txt on the web server which must also be publicly accessible. That's how we know what they don't want indexed. It should be noted that following the directives in robots.txt is voluntary. Though well-behaved search engine indexers respect these rules, there's no way to actually prevent the content from being read and indexed. It is available over the Internet after all.
Here's the blog entry that lists all the stuff they'd like to keep indexers out of:
http://www.bsalert.com/artsearch.php?fn=2&as=607&dt=1
I suppose it's possible that there's some technical reason to do this, but what on earth is wrong with the idea of indexing publicly available content?
What's up? Well, the white house web site (http://www.whitehouse.gov) has been set up to prevent internet search service indexing of lots of its content. I don't know exactly what percentage. Perhaps someone will tally that up eventually. One does this via a file called robots.txt on the web server which must also be publicly accessible. That's how we know what they don't want indexed. It should be noted that following the directives in robots.txt is voluntary. Though well-behaved search engine indexers respect these rules, there's no way to actually prevent the content from being read and indexed. It is available over the Internet after all.
Here's the blog entry that lists all the stuff they'd like to keep indexers out of:
http://www.bsalert.com/artsearch.php?fn=2&as=607&dt=1
I suppose it's possible that there's some technical reason to do this, but what on earth is wrong with the idea of indexing publicly available content?
