There will be no whitewash at the White House

I just read your aticle in the INQ about the whitehouse.gov robots.txt file - I think they are excluding the text only versions of pages so they don't get indexed by google, etc. and then appear in people's search results - only the normal (graphical) versions of the pages will get indexed.

What *is* weird, though, is that for every /text link there is a matching /iraq link. Has someone gone a bit nuts with search and replace? All of the /iraq links I tried don't actually exist as pages, and many don't make much sense - /president/holiday/menagerie/iraq sounds like it would be interesting...

More cock-up than conspiracy I suspect.

Cheers
John

Nick Farrell,

In the story "White House site has oddities, like Bush site" (http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=19357 ) you make a big deal about the large number of exclusions in the 'robots.txt' file. You insinuate that it is because the White House is trying to prevent automated search engines from caching pages that might later be found to be embarrassing.

You say in your article:

"He said that the robots exclusion file does not prevent any person from browsing the Web site. It is aimed at automated 'robots' from reading the pages. And, technically, it does not prevent a robot from reviewing a page but just asks them to not read a page. But the major search engines honour it, so in effect they're prevented from retrieving those pages. He said that the only reason he could thing of is that it is designed to prevent a plugged-in reporter could check a page on a site and compare it with the cached version to see what's changed."

Now, I don't know the 1st thing about web design but by simply typing in some of the URL's of the excluded pages, I quickly came to the conclusion that the vast majority of these pages no longer exist. You could have done this experiment too, if you wanted to spend an extra 5 minutes on your story. I have no idea why they have such a large exclusion list and why they are excluding pages that no longer exist, but obviously it is not to prevent Google and Yahoo from caching the web pages. They can't be cached anyway. Most of the web pages NO LONGER EXIST! Furthermore, the fact that most current White House pages are not included in the ‘robots.txt' (exclusion list) should be ample evidence that your theory of a conspiracy to prevent caching of web pages by search engines is absurd.

I look forward to reading your corrected story, retracting the ridiculous insinuation that the White House is trying to prevent search engines from caching web pages. Maybe you could simply contact the White House's webmaster and ask them?

Thank you for your time,
Chris Triplett

Brasil, Bulgaria go to war

You´re right. We have Dell, HP, IBM and etc here. Theyr prices are really good compared to 3 years ago. But buying the same box from pirates you will spend 50% less - due to taxes and windows - which is everywhere pirated too. But dont get fooled, people at Dell, HP, ... wont sell any 200Gb hd, or an 9800 radeon, or logitech mouse, or any thing cool! We dont have athlon 64 here! Nowhere! The only exception is bussiness, here I use only leggal stuff, and open source whenever it possible. César S. Falcão

Lexmark loses DMCA ink cartridge case

Interestingly a dutch electronic freedom organisation just reported in this article, which they got from here, that the Dutch police confirm printers print a hidden secret unique ID on every page you print which is used to capture counterfitters (and of course just as easy those printing reports against the established powers..). One wonders how and if this ties in with third-party cartridges.

In the story it says that Canon specifically uses this trick and is very actively willing to help trace the printer to the distributor and from there to the shop and with any luck to the purchaser. The Dutch police spokesperson Ed Kraszewski of the KLPD said they have used this technology with some success in the past.

One distributor said he was visited by the KLPD because a printer his firm bought was used to print counterfit traintickets and they wanted to know whom he re-sold the printer to, they said they could see by the ID which specific printer printed the counterfeits, the site reports.

Name supplied...