The country's new robots.txt file
Notice the idiotic - stupid Bush robot.txt file that was there yesterday by incompitent people who didn't understand squat about technology with what is there starting today! by an administration that understands technology.
Here's the robots.txt file from whitehouse.gov yesterday:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow: /search
Disallow: /query.html
Disallow: /omb/search
Disallow: /omb/query.html
Disallow: /expectmore/search
Disallow: /expectmore/query.html
Disallow: /results/search
Disallow: /results/query.html
Disallow: /earmarks/search
Disallow: /earmarks/query.html
Disallow: /help
Disallow: /360pics/text
Disallow: /911/911day/text
Disallow: /911/heroes/text
And it goes on like that for almost 2400 lines!
Here's the new Obama robots.txt file:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /includes/
We can all believe in change - elegant simple profoundly needed change.
SOURCEWhite House new media director. He is Macon Phillips, formerly with Blue State
Digital, and he is the first to post in a new White House blog, one of
the features of the instantly remodeled presidential site, whitehouse.gov.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/Prof. Peter P. Swire:
1. Macon Phillips, who wrote the first whitehouse.gov blog post today,
is the first White House Director of New Media. He led New Media for
the transition, for change.gov, and was deeply involved with New Media
during the campaign.
2. The copyright policy, at http://www.whitehouse.gov/copyright/,
explains that government-produced materials are in the public domain.
It continues the transition's use of a Creative Commons license,
however, for third-party material posted to whitehouse.gov, such as
citizen comments. I'm pretty sure that is the first use of a Creative
Commons license on whitehouse.gov.
3. For accessibility, http://www.whitehouse.gov/accessibility/
explains a number of measures to make whitehouse.gov accessible,
including the closed captioning for videos that was included in recent
videos on change.gov. As new features are rolled out on
whitehouse.gov, comments are sought on ways to ensure accessibility.
4. For privacy, http://www.whitehouse.gov/privacy/ mostly is the same
as the change.gov privacy policy. Concerning federal government
guidelines on the use of persistent cookies, the privacy policy notes
that a waiver has been issued by the Whte House Counsel's office to
permit the use of a persistent cookie for videos that are visible on
whitehouse.gov. The site says that video providers may set a
persistent cookie in order to maintain the integrity of video
statistics. The site also notes that users who do not wish to have
the persistent cookie set generally have the option of downloading the
video in an alternative format.
URGENT PRIVACY ISSUE WITH WHITEHOUSE.GOV WEBSITE: : Karl Auerbach
That new website contains a web tracking bug that feeds access data to
a private tracking company (webtrendslive).
And that web bug does not appear to be noted in the new whitehouse
site's privacy policy.
A while back I noted that the US Weather Service is equally feeding
user access data to a private company, in that case Google, without
any disclosure of this in their privacy policy, nor, in the case of
the Weather Service, any response when a note is sent to their privacy
officer.
These may well be inadvertent things done by civil service webmasters,
but they demonstrate how easily even well intended government agencies
can slip onto the path of leaking information about citizens' use of
their government's services or citizens' access to their government's
information.
--karl--
<Karen>