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A website that deletes itself once indexed by Google
- lukasm 12y agoWhat problem does it solve? EDIT: that was an honest question.
- yk 12y agoCool, but why? ( And shoulden't we invent digital Baroque art before inventing digital postmodernism?)
- psykovsky 12y agoBecause.
- javajosh 12y agoNormally this kind of comment gets downvoted, and rightly so. But in this context, it's perfect. Well done.
- psykovsky 12y agoI wouldn't mind the downvotes at all. But I really thought it was the only acceptable answer for the why. :)
- threatofrain 12y agoThe reason why "Laconian wit" is normally frowned upon is because it's actually almost disruptively lazy. In the event that almost everyone agrees with you, then that's okay. But should anyone disagree with you, now they're going to have to do the heavy lifting for YOUR side. That disrupts the willingness someone has to even converse with you, and if someone retorts with similarly Laconian wit, you can see the conversation breaks down really fast, because nobody is willing to put in the extra effort to flesh out someone else's opinion when there's no reciprocity or show of effort.
- cheatsheet 12y agoBoth exist. Postmodernism is a lot more relevant to the digital age than anything, imo. It emphasizes pointing out ways of thinking and doing, which I think is especially relevant when we are actually automating most of our ways of thinking and doing. I know it gets a bad rap because of the ridiculous examples, but the real point of it engages the viewer into a serious kind of contemplation concerning the massive infrastructure that exists and how that shapes our culture, thoughts, understanding, action.. We have the expectation that the generations to come will accept this infrastructure and what it says about how the human mind functions. But much of it is founded on belief systems of how thought and action operate in the real world. Most of these systems are baseless, the idea of a base obfuscated only by the sheer complexity involved in understanding each layer.
- matt4077 12y agoPlease don't tell me Geocities was our Renaissance.
- cheatsheet 12y agoI really look forward to when we, as academics, historically document and seriously examine the various phases of the internet, from a variety of alternative perspectives. It's interesting while it's being built, but it's also interesting to look back and reflect on the bigger picture, outside of the buzzwords and technical terminology used to pull the creation through, and make it actualized. I look forward when critics and theorists start thinking about the goal of the internet from a social perspective, a collective cultural subconscious directive. I look forward to all the kinds of art history theoretical methodology used to explain the significance of Picasso or Manet in their respective time periods, to use the same kinds of methodology to reason about the relation between the internet and everything that is not the internet. It's interesting when some information gets washed away and other information is retained through time, and it isn't always the stuff that is indexed that is retained. The idea that art critics can even agree to call the same collection of works "cubism" or "impressionism" fascinates me, and I look forward to the same kinds of invented vocabularies being used to describe various processes, movements, and patterns throughout internet culture (way beyond studying memes and tropes - there are so many layers to the collective psyche of the internet, it is dumbfounding). I don't know what geocities represents. I'd have to define it's 'kind' and compare and contrast it to other 'kinds' throughout time. I know this was meant to be a humorous comment, but I love to weave theories, and some of them even turn out to be descriptive of the nature of things.
- ssalazar 12y agoJust check out any of the MIDI music forums for some sweet digital baroque art.
- egypturnash 12y agoAAA games: where someone is paid to do nothing but design the details on imaginary Dwarven armor for an entire year. If that ain't baroque I don't know what is.
- FaisalRashid 12y ago@Cjlm, what type of problem does it solve?
- sorokod 12y agoA Google worshiping sand mandala ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_mandala http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_mandala ) ?
- ikeboy 12y agoAnyone know the origin or have an archive?
- imjustsaying 12y agoI see what you did there, I think.
- TimWolla 12y agoThe origin is this: http://eep40h.herokuapp.com/ http://eep40h.herokuapp.com/
- ikeboy 12y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20150213152238/http://eep40h.herokuapp.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20150213152238/http://eep40h.her... Yay! Edit: and now https://archive.today/3QpC9 https://archive.today/3QpC9
- eatonphil 12y agoIs this indexed by google? Doesn't this make the attempt a failure (this time)?
- ikeboy 12y agoI've submitted it to Google, hopefully it makes it.
- aqwas 12y agoIF anything, that's a much deeper comment than the website itself. No matter how hard you try, it's impossible to really destroy something once it's been on the web. Resistance is futile.
- scribu 12y agoThat's not quite the point being made, since the site didn't even attempt to block indexing via robots.txt or a meta tag.
- dsjoerg 12y agoIt's a digital embodiment of coolness; once the masses can find out about it, it isn't cool anymore and the coolness is gone. Literally.
- cubano 12y agoSnapchat for websites...hmmmm perhaps.
- shubhamjain 12y agoHow about detecting GoogleBot traffic and deleting when it has crawled your website?
- tjgq 12y agoThen anyone would be able to trigger the autodestruct by spoofing their UA.
- bernardlunn 12y agoLike a snow angel? Art that auto destructs? Stay in the moment.
- hartator 12y agohttps://github.com/mroth/unindexed/blob/master/views/alive.ect https://github.com/mroth/unindexed/blob/master/views/alive.e...
- frik 12y agoAn alternative would be to check for the browser user agent and delete the website right at that point and return a 404 page to the Google crawler bot. Then Google won't have a static copy of the website.
- ForHackernews 12y agoThey do tell google not to save a static copy: > the NOARCHIVE meta tag is specified which prevents the Googles from caching their own copy of the content.
- ikeboy 12y agoWouldn't that only prevent the user from seeing the cache? I mean, if it's indexed, then google must have it cached, right?
- adanto6840 12y agoThat meta tag prevents Google from publicly showing their cached version of the page. In practice this means the "Cached" link, within the results, doesn't appear when a given page asks Google to NOARCHIVE -- which I believe can be 'asked for' via either the meta tag or via a special response header. Edit: Yeah, 'noarchive' can be specified via the meta tag or via header. Also available to you are a handful of other directives such as NoIndex, NoFollow, NoArchive, NoSnippet, NoTranslate, etc... See these links for more in-depth info about the directives & which search engines support what: Directives & Usage in Meta tags - http://noarchive.net/meta/ http://noarchive.net/meta/ Usage in Response Headers - http://noarchive.net/xrobots/ http://noarchive.net/xrobots/
- LukeB_UK 12y agoThe problem with that is that you could spoof the user agent.
- jonlucc 12y agoBut Google probably doesn't bother, right?
- neilellis 12y agoI have to say I'm not usually a fan of conceptual art, but kudos - the concept is great. Keep experimenting!
- byte1918 12y agoThank you. http://i.imgur.com/cjDeLEb.png http://i.imgur.com/cjDeLEb.png EDIT: What's with the downvote hate? Somebody actually posted a valid key...
- striking 12y agoPeople likely didn't understand that someone posted a key for a game on that website and thought that you just posted an unrelated images.
- PhasmaFelis 12y agoAs far as I can tell, you just posted part of a random screengrab from your web browser for no obvious reason. Striking's response suggests that this is actually a reference to a site which, per the OP, is gone forever, along with any chance of getting your joke. So...I'm not really sure what you were expecting.
- arash_milani 12y ago"Death is reason for the beauty of butterfly"
- ars 12y agoWho said that? I could not agree less. Butterflies are beautiful for their color, not their death.
- arash_milani 12y agoIt's from "Sohrap Sepehri" [1] an Iranian poet and painter. and I think the replies to your comments answer you question. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sohrab_Sepehri https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sohrab_Sepehri
- TeMPOraL 12y agoWhoever said that, probably meant selection pressure.
- mod 12y agoPotentially also that if every butterfly that ever existed were still alive, we wouldn't be very fond of them.
- WA 12y agoNot sure if I see this as "art" or something. I mean, irrevocably deletes itself could be attached to a thousand arbitrary things. - deleted after 100 visitors - deleted if visited with IE 6.0 for the first time - deleted if referrer is Facebook - ...
- comboy 12y agoAlso, irrecovability seems a bit questionable (google cache, archive.org etc.)
- getsat 12y ago<meta http-equiv="Cache-Control" content="no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate" /> <meta http-equiv="Pragma" content="no-cache" /> <meta http-equiv="Expires" content="0" /> + Cache-Control: no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate Pragma: no-cache Expires: 0 + User-agent: ia_archiver Disallow: / Of course, this won't prevent crawlers which do not honor these headers/meta tags from caching your site, but if you're not in Google's index you're likely not getting traffic from said crawlers.
- comboy 12y agoGood point. I wonder if meta tags were updated later or did archive.org ignore them - https://web.archive.org/web/20150213152238/http://eep40h.herokuapp.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20150213152238/http://eep40h.her...
- thewizardofmys 12y agoI see some potential use of this, for example as soon as Google crawlers reach the site I know that it is accessible from outside and I destroy the site.
- aqme28 12y agoWhat is the purpose of a website that is inaccessible "from outside"?
- jessaustin 12y agoMaybe it's a resource that should only be used by people in a particular organization?
- kordless 12y agoIt's not a purpose. It is a detection of state, however.
- placeybordeaux 12y agoThat seems to be the exact use case. Did you want to elaborate on why you find that useful?
- tonyarkles 12y agoI had a client once who had something similar, although unintentionally. She approached me because her website "kept getting hacked" and she didn't trust the original developers to solve the security problems... And rightly so! There were two factors that, together, made this happen: first, the admin login form was implemented in JS, and if you went to log in with it with JS disabled, it wouldn't verify your credentials. And it submitted via a GET request. Second, once you were in the admin interface, you could delete content from the site by clicking on an X in the CMS. Which, as was the pattern, presented you with a JS alert() prompt before deleting the content... via a GET request. Looking at the server logs around the time it got "hacked", you could see GoogleBot happily following all the delete links in the admin interface.
- brador 12y agoWhat's the idea solution for this? I would drop a cookie and use that to verify admin privileges on each page. Is that right?
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- jessaustin 12y agoFirst, use the correct HTTP verb: POST (or possibly DELETE). Googlebot only GETs. Also as you note, destructive changes should be authenticated, whether by Basic Auth over TLS or the more common cookie tokens.
- Mahn 12y agoAuthentication, POST requests and CSRF tokens, at the bare minimum.
- ben0x539 12y agoFundamentally, authentication when someone tries to delete a thing needs to happen in server-side logic, not on the client side. The rest is flavouring.
- psykovsky 12y agoYou mean a website which can't be used with Chrome or even with Android itself, on any browser.
- hellbanner 12y agoGuess I better clone the source before its deleted..
- switchb4 12y agoOh I was thinking something very similar few minutes ago and when I opened hacker news and saw this post I was amazed
- hackhat 12y ago>Why would you do such a thing? My full explanation was in the content of the site. (edit: ...which is now gone) So anyone really understood why he did this?
- TeMPOraL 12y agoMy guess - because he could, and likely had some good laugh when discussing it with friends.
- tlrobinson 12y agoI'm surprised there are so many people on Hacker News asking "why?". Hackers don't need a reason, other than it being clever, novel, fun, etc. But if you want a reason there are plenty: * art: there are numerous interpretations of this * fun: this is sort of the digital equivalent of a "useless box" http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/ef0b/ http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/ef0b/ * science: experiment to see how widespread a URL can be shared without Google becoming aware of it * security: embed unique tokens in your content to detect if it has leaked to the public
- soheil 12y agoI think more and more the word hacker has lost its original meaning at least in this community. If I were reading a similar story on a tor hidden service, let's say, I would not be asking why, but here I do.
- TeMPOraL 12y agoIt's totally twisted, because "business types" got involved and everyone started confusing "hacking" with "working". This story is a cool but simple hack, in the original meaning of the word. I find that a good definition of a hack is "a project or a trick that you can tell to your tech friends over a beer and have some good laugh from it".
- RexRollman 12y agoMy first thought was filesharing.
- TeMPOraL 12y agoAuto-DMCA-ing yourself?
- RexRollman 12y agoExactly.
- raimondious 12y ago
- whoopdedo 12y agoWhat about the opposite? A website that created when it is indexed? Start with nothing and content is added each time the site is visited by Googlebot, or shared on Facebook, tweeted, posted on Reddit, etc. The website exists only so that it can be shared, and the act of sharing it defines what the website is.
- TeMPOraL 12y agoThis is an uber cool idea. Especially if, when this website is shared by someone, it would attempt to scan the sharer's public feed, last submissions, last comments, last tweets, etc. (depending on where it got shared), and generate additional content based on what it found. Sounds like an awesome weekend project.
- scottcanoni 12y agoI would be interested in similar experiments but with a couple of minor variations to see the effects of each: 1. Sending the NOINDEX meta tag 2. Combining meta tags 3. Monitoring for a referrer URL that matches a Google search page to catch the 1st non-sneaky user coming from the index. 4. Monitoring other search engines and their behaviors.
- facepalm 12y agoI have a thought that I will forget immediately once somebody asks me what it is. Now I am an artist, yay :-)
- qu4z-2 12y agoWhat is it?
- tzury 12y agoa) One can also use referer to check whether a visitor has come from Google to trigger the deletion (in addition to "seek itself in Google"). b) robots.txt shall get the same results, plus, no cached content at Google, unlike "deleting itself", which the cache content remains at Google.
- angelortega 12y agogrep Googlebot /var/www/log/* && rm -rf /var/www/site
- colund 12y agoThis makes me think about the immensely cool self destructing sunglasses in Mission Impossible