Friday, September 20, 2002

I noticed that some bot had scanned a bunch of the pages on my webserver. The user-agent was conspicuous, since it went by the name "Indy Library". I did some research and found that this is the user-agent specified in some Delphi and C++ Builder libraries. Well, those libraries have been used to create an email harvester bot [here]. That's too bad, since I, and many other webmasters, will be blocking access to any bot that uses "Indy Library" as its user-agent name. This is likely to break code written for ligitimate purposes if those same Delphi or C++ libraries are used.
5:58:43 PM    


Wireless Lillies (Illustration by lostinspace)Wired has an article that metaphorically equates WiFi network nodes with water lillies [here]. I like this analogy. Here's what it has to say about the telco's latest "innovation", 3G:

3G, in its most generous projections, will deliver data speeds of 1 megabit per second — in two years. Today, Wi-Fi commonly provides 11 megabits, offering up to 54 megabits. Which standard do you think will be adopted?

As soon as I can afford it, I'm gonna stick a WiFi hub at my house. Damned unemployment.
3:48:17 PM