Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
to your family and friends, you may maintain a folder of pictures
you have taken during recent activities or trips. The folder is not
identified on your home page, and there are no other links to this
folder of pictures. Your intent is to give the URL of this folder to se
lected friends and relatives for their enjoyment, and you make the
folder public so that these designated folks have access to your pic
tures—regardless of where they might be. Because you have kept
this URL reasonably secret, you hope that others will not know
about it.
Although this may be convenient, it involves some risks.
Suppose, for example, you named the folder “photos”—an easily
guessed name. If someone typed your home page and added “pho
tos”—just as a guess—then they might be able to click on any file
in the directory. Because you made your folder public over the
Web for your friends, others guessing the folder name also could
access it. On some systems, you may be able to set permission
codes to specify whether individual directories and files are pub
licly accessible. If so, you may be able to control just which files
anyone can read.
These controls can work well, but be aware that accidents hap
pen when directories and files are moved or changed and permis
sions are relaxed by mistake. For example, in late June 2003, Apple
Computer was updating its Web pages in anticipation of an an
nouncement of new products a few weeks later. In the process of
adding new pages, however, permissions were relaxed for just a few
minutes, and several people read about the new products. Apple
corrected the permissions quickly, but the new product line still was
discussed that evening on the national news.
Beyond materials you explicitly post on your Web pages, infor
mation about you may find its way onto the Web when you regis
ter at Web sites or even at public locations, such as museums. For
example, a few years ago I was teaching a class for firstyear stu
dents and noticed one registered student had a reasonably distinc
tive name. In searching for this name on the Web, I discovered the
student had visited a museum in Florida on a particular date ear
lier that year. Although the student did not care that this record of
a family trip was posted, the student was quite surprised that I
knew about it at the first class meeting. (The example provided the
class with a wonderful example of the availability of information
on the Web.)
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