[LINK] Psych department web stats

[Rick Welykochy]

Richard Chirgwin wrote:

> You do know that hosts files like this are extremely common around the 
> Internet?
> 
> Try Googling for
> hosts requests bytes transferred site:au
> and see what you get.

21,000 matches. But be wary of quick google deductions.

Out of the first 100 or so hits, I found less than ten actual logs.
Most of the hits are FAQs and system docs.


> I'm not sure that identifying the ISP from which a request comes, or 
> that discovering that the Googlebot visits everyone, or that archive.org 
> does the same, represents a serious breach of privacy.

The presence of a domain name or IP address does more than identify the
ISP. It identifies a machine or possibly NAT gateway. In either case, if
the web request originated from a consumer, the log entry actually uniquely
identifies that consumer.

Does a publicly available list of consumers IPs (as one example) who accessed
a given web server constitute a breach of privacy?


cheers
rickw


-- 
________________________________________________________________
Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services || Internet Driving Instructor

Lumping configuration data, security data, kernel tuning parameters,
etc. into one monstrous fragile binary data structure is really dumb.
      -- David F. Skoll