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May 18, 2005
Dr. Lenz, Wacky nutjob of Freakin Genius?
Dr. Karl-Friedrich Lenz, a professor at Aoyama Gakuin University has started a bit of a campaign against Google focusing on the privacy issues associated with Google's new Beta Web Accelerator.
Personally I don't agree with him. I certainly understand why he doesn't like it, but from a practical level I feel that privacy and the internet are almost exclusive ideas. I still do not see the internet as some free, untainted country where enlightened folk can freely share ideas and stick it to the man. It's left over surplus from the cold war that has slowly evolved sending chain letters to your buddies across the country to a multi-billion dollar SPAM/anti-SPAM industry.
People will continue to sacrifice more and more privacy in the name of convenience. Homer (the yellow one, not the dude in a toga) says gimme my porn faster and I'll rummage through my neighbors garbage and tell you what I find.
I think Lenz does a much better job of defending his point of view here.
I agree with a lot here, but in the end I just don't buy it.
However,
In the process of his cause, Dr. Lenz has made a few modifications to his Blog.
The first was to ban Google bots.
His next step was just pretty darn neeto.
He modified his .htaccess file to reroute all traffic coming from a google reference to redirect to Yahoo.
RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$ RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://www.google.co.jp [OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://www.google.com [OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://www.google.de RewriteRule /* http://www.yahoo.com [R,L]
Here's the whole explination.
Lenz Blog: Rewriting requests from Google
So in a nutshell, if anyone sees a link in Google to his site, whenever they clock on it the go to Yahoo instead! That is freaking elegant!
He's already taken the script offline. But man, that's just neeto. I wonder if something like this could be used against comment spam.
Posted by Kakyou at May 18, 2005 07:44 PM
Comments
Perhaps it's just me, but this is not neeto: this is completely retarded.
First, from a purely geeky technical point of view this is extremely poor scripting: he could *at the very least* have redirected visitors to a matching Yahoo search (equivalent to the Google one he was brought by). It can be done and requires all of a dozen extra characters in his .htaccess file.
Second, and more importantly, this is about as user-unfriendly as I could ever fathom. And by "unfriendly", I mean downright insulting.
That he took a dislike to Google and asks to be removed from Googlebot: fine. It's his choice and his PR suicide after all, I don't see why I'd care. But where in the world does he get off hogging visitor's time and browsers to impose his rather weak argument on potential visitors (particularly visitors that quite possibly may have found interest in reading him, since they browsed to his website in the first place): way to drive them away for good...
At the end of the day, I don't have a strong opinion about GWA's morals and intents, except that it's an unspeakably shoddy product by a company that is neither evil nor good incarnate, but just yet another random successful corporation trying to diversify.
But if I had a point to make, I would at least try not to shoot myself in the foot making it...
Posted by: dr Dave at June 3, 2005 08:51 PM