startling banals

15 October 2007

Download your blog

My friend Maymon showed me a command wget three years ago. I used to download my homepage using wget (This wikipedia article calls it your own personal web crawler) You can download entire filesystems of not so secure websites like those hosted on geocities without having to login. It can be very useful if you want to download a file that has a broken link - simply download the whole filesystem of that website - you will find your file somewhere in there.

But this means that there is really no such thing as privacy on the internet. It must be easy to download our emails too for someone chaloo enough in this creepy web-crawling game.

"wget -r http://quitsmoke.blogspot.com ." will get my whole blog to your current directory nicely arranged in archives the way blogger stores it.

4 Comments:

Thanks for the info. Let me check up on this. But I think emails can be copied only if your site's administrators are careless. Don't forget file systems also have securities and I don't think this tool can break OS level security.
BTW Today is the so called blog action day.
( http://blogactionday.org/ )
The theme this year is environment. I hope you find time to post something related environment today!

Wishwas
Anonymous Anonymous, at 15.10.07  
I know nothing at all about filesystem security.. this is just a layperson's paranoia :D
Please tell me if you find anything interesting related to this.

Since google runs google.com their spiders must be the strongest - so I googled 72.14.207.191 and saw this Is google spying more strong?
Blogger anish, at 15.10.07  
Another related thing is web analytics.
Google almost wiped out specialised comapanies when it took over Urchin and 'brought web analytics to the common man' via google analytics.

I think they must be having another layer to collect data on how people use the data about who visits their personal blogs. It is like the internet has become google's laboratory and we are unwittingly becoming guinea pigs whenever we use the free stuff google gives out. There is google analytics working even on your scrapbook in orkut if you check the page source.

Maybe i am being unnecessarily paranoid but these are not great signs - and the internet is still really so young.
Blogger anish, at 15.10.07  
I thought you were suggesting any ordinary guy can use 'wget' and get access to emails. What the governmets and other powerfuls can do is quite a different game . Btw another interesting software like wget is cURL.

Wishwas
Anonymous Anonymous, at 15.10.07  

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