On saying things you know nothing about

[Doug Yanega]

Richard Zander wrote:

>Say, take a few moments to check out the things *you've* typed for
>posterity. You'll be surprized how easy it will be that generations of
>college kids are going to cite your every unconsidered thought here on
>the Web. http://altavista.digital.com

Altavista isn't the worst of it - DejaNews archives every single posting to
the Usenet newsgroups, so those of us who post to groups in the sci.bio.*
hierarchy will have our old postings around to haunt us forever, as well as
our mailing list archives. Frankly, that is not so much a problem as the
VOLUME of stuff that can result, making it impossible or anyone interested
in your postings to actually find important material therein. These
archives can be and are being used by advertisers to target people. The
only thing I've been informed will stop it is to place the line
"x-no-archive: yes" as the first line of any postings you don't want
archived. I don't know if this works for mailing list archives like
taxacom.
        A similar thing applies to ALL users of Netscape - most people are
unaware that Netscape automatically saves files recording your use of the
Web, and that these files are NOT PRIVATE. Apparently anyone with the
know-how can obtain complete logs of all the Web sites you visit, without
your ever knowing that this information has been made available to them,
and this feature is regularly exploited by marketing research people. There
is precious little privacy in the electronic age.

Doug Yanega       Illinois Natural History Survey, 607 E. Peabody Dr.
Champaign, IL 61820 USA      phone (217) 244-6817, fax (217) 333-4949
 affiliate, Univ. of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Dept. of Entomology
          http://www.inhs.uiuc.edu:80/~dyanega/my_home.html
  "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
        is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82