Harvard Hacked at URL Guessers
Ed Felten offers an interesting analysis of the legal and technical implications of the Harvard Business School URL-hacking incident.More than 100 applicants to the school have been summarily rejected because they changed fields in a URL to see if they had been accepted, learning about the technique from weblogs or message boards.
Felten believes the school's punishment is extreme:
I might feel differently if I knew that the applicants were aware that they were breaking the rules. But I'm not sure that an applicant, on being told that his letter was already on the web and could be accessed by constructing a particular URL, would necessarily conclude that accessing it was against the rules.
Incidents like these make me wonder how anyone can argue that modifying a URL is inappropriate, much less compare it to breaking in to a computer system.
If you make something available at a URL, you've invited the world to view it. Harvard should be dropping the hammer on ApplyYourself, the company whose poor programming revealed admission decisions prematurely, not on these hapless applicants.
Update: One of the peeking applicants said knowing early about his rejection helped him pursue another school before it was too late.
I Blog For Short
New York Times:On the Web log, or blog, he chronicles his daily life, his small victories, his disappointments, his liberal views on politics and the health of his pets.
Mosteller's supervisors and co-workers at the Durham, N.C., Herald-Sun were well aware of her Weblog, or blog.
The lanky, sandy-haired writer composes a frequently updated Internet journal -- weblog, or blog for short ...
Hands-on science experiments, creating an online Weblog -- or "blog" -- and learning how to project video images onto oneself to create living art are just some of the offerings.
What is a weblog or blog? A weblog, or "blog" for short, is a kind of website or a part of a website.
I was reading his site in 1999 when Peter Merholz coined the term blog, putting a harsh German sound to a new publishing practice he described as "information upchucking."
Six years and 7.7 million blogs later, our web sites (or sites for short) are still being explained to the public on first reference. How many Senate Majority Leaders, network news anchors, and gay Republican reporter hookers do we have to bring down before the press realizes that weblog is a four-letter word?
Advertising consultant Hugh MacLeod draws one-panel comic strips on the back of business cards. I regard the term "online cartoonist" with dread, but today's strip is inspired, as are a few other digs against blogging.Microsoft has been experimenting with a server-side news aggregator integrated with MSN Search.The experiment appears to be offline this morning, but Richard MacManus grabbed a few screenshots.
Eric Goldman has expanded his thoughts on whether Google Toolbar violates copyright law:The Heritage Foundation has declared that I am a tech-elite busybody for criticizing the Google Toolbar:I'd be delighted to be wrong on the legal question. But we have to answer the positive question based on the law today, not as we wish it were.
This week's busybody pushback is the same sort of reaction we've seen in response to every half-innovative feature that Google's offered in recent years, from its Adwords advertising program to advertising-supported Gmail. Oddly enough, the tech elite still seem to respect the company's technological prowess and innovation. They're wary, however, that Google intends to profit from these services, no matter how much upside they offer users in the process.
... isn't it bizarre that so many paranoid souls would campaign for government restrictions on what you can do with data that's on your own computer?
I'm glad that the conservative think tank has found a privacy interest in my computer, even if it remains unable to detect one in a womb or bedroom.
The First Blogger Died in 1794
The patron saint of weblogging is Harbottle Dorr, a little-known figure from early America who was writing a hyperlinked daily journal on current events two centuries before the technology existed:
On January 7, 1765, in the middle of the Stamp Act controversy, Boston shopkeeper Harbottle Dorr took the current issue of the Boston Evening-Post and commented on its contents in the margins. Every week thereafter, he collected one or both of the Evening-Post or the Boston Gazette, (sometimes adding a Boston Post-Boy & Advertiser) and continued expressing himself in the margins on the events, referring backward and forward in a maze of cross-references to other documents and stories relevant to the events reported in the news.
The final result 12 years later was an astonishing archive -- 3,280 pages of annotated newspapers, plus the appended documents and Dorr's own indexes to the four volumes he compiled. This entire unbroken run of annotated Boston newspapers will not only allow students of American history a unique look at the pre-Revolutionary era in New England, but will also provide insight into the thinking of citizen Dorr on the controversies and topics of the times.
An average citizen marking up the news every day with his own opinions and furiously cross-referencing his work, Dorr was a blogger. Reading about this collection makes me want to park myself at a microfilm reader for a few months to read this hypertext. So many questions: Was he a warblogger? Did he fisk people? Would he have objected to autolinking?
When Dorr died in 1794, his entire estate consisted of the four "newspaper books" that constituted his blog. They sold for 7 pounds and 10 shillings.
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