Alta Vista, Great Stuff!

[Steve Gibbons]

In Article: <199601170427.XAA27753 at UNiX.asb.com>, Beethoven <wlkngowl at unix.asb.com> wrote:

# Hey, I saw a message on the list about personal mail
# showing up in an A.V. search, and figured why not try
# it out and see what comes up under one of my nyms...

# Lo and behold, my nym corresponds with the title of a
# popular comic strip and an episode in a bad TV show...

# Crypto related?

# Imagine your nym is related to something common-place at
# the time of posting.  Even though you may be well known
# under that nym, simple searches for that name will turn up
# loads of crapola, or at least some light entertainment
# for someone searching for oyur past posts.

# (It can also turn some unsuspecting people looking for the
# crapola onto your interests...)

# Yes, I know that sophisticated search engines and simple
# expressions can filter out most of the unwanted junk, but
# not all of it.  Likewise filtering will let some of your
# posts fall through the web-crawler-cracks.

I've ran into three similar situations lateley.
1) Quite a few people assume that aztech.com is Aztech Labs, the makers of
various sound cards, video cards, and CD-ROM drives.  (I _wish_ these fols
would use the various search engines to find who/what they're looking for.)

2) I'm hosting a web-page for a band called One Foot In The Grave.  There's a
(fairly popular, I guess) British sit-com by the same name, with quite a few
followers that have set up pages for the TV show.

3) There happens to be a steve at tezcat.com, and we occasionally receive email
from long-lost aquaintances that was intended for the other.  Generally this is
in response to something that either one of us posted to Usenet.

Crypto relevance?  Only on item 3, if PK encryption was in wide-spread use, and
easy to use, this wouldn't happen.  The MUA would realize that it didn't have a
local PK key for steve at tezcat.com, and inform the user (who could then perform
a soundex lookup on their existing keys, and realize that they meant to contact
steve at aztech.com.)

Soundex (or equivilant technology) search spiders are going to make the whole 
mess even worse...

ObPunk: I decided that the easiest way to hide from item 1 was to change domain
names.  By chance, someone else was interested in aztech.com, so I even made a
profit.  :)

I keep meaning to write something up, and submit it to comp.risks, but who has
the time?...

--
Steve at AZTech.Net