Google has introduced a new feature which enables people to search inside of otherwise compressed source code.  This is not bad.  However it is bad.  Exploit searches?  Default passwords?  While it is stupid to have exploits in code, and equally stupid (and less forgiveable) to have default passwords; this is the real world that we live in.  People screw up.  Coders themselves are aware that their programs may have bugs.  Giving people a method to search through all the code ever posted online is…interesting.

Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.  You can probably read most of the things on my webserver; I leave it rather open (or rather dreamhost does by default and I don’t restrict much).  However there are days (like this one) when I wonder if opt-out is really the best choice for internet indexing.  The fact that I need to hide things (proactively) from search engines is rather…crappy.

It brings me back to the realization that the internet was already fucked over.  The spiders already crawl (many not following standards) and the only real way to keep data safe is not to publish it.  To shield my data using html forms and cookies.  The Wild Wild West Indeed.  The internet is not a friendly place (maybe it never was?).  It seems that it never will be again.

While I’m usually for freedom of information; I’m not that for it now ;)