If you're writing a web spider, what should you do when you see alink marked rel="nofollow" ?

In theory, you can do nothing different from any other link.It's not a formal specification, and the original description only talks about the resulting link not giving the target any credit.

In practice, on the Internet what people expect is in largepart defined by what the 800 pound gorillas do. And both Googleand MSN Search consider nofollow to be literal: don

Every so often I take a look at what user agents are visiting WanderingThoughts . Tonight it turned up a doozy; a single visit with a User-Agent of:

Presumably the intended attack vector was sites that summarize useragent traffic onto a web page without escaping the text; that wouldmake this user-agent string into live JavaScript that would forceany visitor's browser to go there.

The attack is also noteworthy for how

Let's see what sort of April Fools joke the spammers have been havingthis week. This week, we:

• got 14,298 messages from 221 different IP addresses.
• handled 18,642 sessions from 966 different IP addresses.
• received 153,366 connections from at least 49,555 different IPaddresses.
• hit a highwater of 17 connections being checked at once.

Connection volume is up from last week , butsession volume

My department has always done a lot of different things. Many years agowe were called 'Computing Services' ('University of Toronto ComputingServices' if you were being formal), and one of those things was a bunchof modems on a Sun 4. Of course, we had a greeting banner:

U of T Computing Services.

login:

(roughly what you saw if you dialed in.)

One April 1st, a co-worker changed this to ' U of T Confusing Services '.

The