misc sites

	Hidden Universes of Information on the Internet
	5. Misc. Sites

Check your persona Right now. Make sure you understand what webmasters know about You. (If the link returns an error, try these back-ups: Web Site Environment Variables, What We Know About You,)

Important Message from Russ... I have removed the remainder of the hyperlinks from this page in order keep "attention" away from my personal web site (navigators.com). Follow this Link to see the bulk of the real content of this section. (i.e. a list of many interesting sites)

Read on... If you would like to learn what steps I have taken to shield my Site.

Some of the links I am leading you to are controversial/dangerous. Recognize that when you visit a web page, there are many things that are automatically revealed to that site's webserver. For example, visit this site right now (go ahead - it's safe) to see what kind of "Web Site Environment Variables" are being passed back and forth from your browser to the other web server. Also try: What we know about you, CDT PRivacy demonstration page. Some of the key variables to notice:

HTTP_REFERER	Notice that it contains the full web address of this web page. Web masters use this to see what other web pages have been driving traffic towards there site.
HTTP_VIA	If you are using a Proxy Gateway, the name of that gateway is also collected
REMOTE_ADDR	This is the IP Number of either Your Computer, or your organization's Proxy Gateway
REMOTE_HOST	This is the Name of Your Computer. This is often referred to as your "persona" Be very self-conscious of how your web surfing actions reflect upon your organization's "persona". For example should you visit devil_worshipping.com from your_company.com? (or bad_guy.com from agency.gov)

As you can see, a webmaster can get a pretty good sense as to who is visiting their site, and who sent them there. I decided that I did not want webmasters of dangerous.com to easily associate that navigators.com was pointing all kinds of agencies.gov at their sites.

My solution - To make it harder for a webmaster to discover who was linking towards their site. My assumption is that webmasters are busy people, and after one or two hurdles they would give-up.

Here is a list of the steps I took:

I have created a new web site that is in no way associated with me or my own website. I have placed my page full of links at this other site. "Follow this Link" takes you this other web site which serves as a waystation page. At the other site, you will notice that there are no links pointing back to me or my website.
This page that you are currently viewing, contains a link to my waystation page at the other site. In fact, this page is the only online web page that points to my waystation page. A clever webmaster could easily search Altavista for all pages that contain a hyperlink to my waystation page; and this page at navigators.com would appear in the search results. I have therefore placed a file called robots.txt in my website to keep the major (well-behaved) robots out of this navigators.com/guide directory. I have also included the appropriate noindex/nocopy robot commands in meta-tags within this web page and those pages located at my waystation web site. These steps should ensure that this page, and my waystation page, are never copied into a major search engine. See Robot Exclusion Standard Revisited for more details.
I viewed the HTML of these web pages, and manually removed the "authored by" meta-tag. Many web authoring tools automatically imbed your name into all web pages that you build.
There are several other subtle steps I have taken as well. (I don't want everything in print :-)

Web Statistics - your public web server has detailed access statistics as to who has been visiting each and every page within your site. You should work towards having easy, click-able access to this information for each of your pages. For example, look at this annotated view of the access statistics for my own web site (My site isn't the best example to illustrate this, since my traffic consists mostly of my course alumni). Some of the visitors to my site are dial-up customers through an ISP, but there are many business domains also indicated. Your organization could easily develop a customized web access report which omits anyone from aol.com, erols.com, etc. Recognize that the webmasters of the sites you visit, will have access to this same kind of information.

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I can be reached at Russweb@navigators.com or 703-729-1757 Copyright © 1998 Information Navigators

Hidden Universes of Information on the Internet

5. Misc. Sites

Hidden Universes of Information
on the Internet