If the point of the system is primarily to create plausible deniability for the end-user, that is, to allow them to say "hayneedle hit the site, not me, so I am innocent", then I'd say it could be effective in that regard barring some proviso in the law that allow them to persecute someone who did not actually even visit a site of their own volition. Beyond that, it's also effective in terms of turning up the noise to signal ratio and making this law that much less effective, while placing a greater burden of ISPs who are then more likely to lobby against it ever more vigorously.... all while remaining entirely 'white area' in terms of functionality.
I understand your post, but I don't think Mr. Ziegler was over-selling his product's effectiveness beyond what it is really capable of.
Take care, Matt johan beisser wrote:
On Nov 10, 2007, at 9:28 AM, Paul Sebastian Ziegler wrote:The mechanism is quite easy: It searches Google for random words and picks random pages among the results, then spiders from there (well it is spidering except that it only follows one URL at a time within a session thus simulating a user).There's a few things wrong with this approach. Most of them were outlined by Bruce Schneier when he reviewed "TrackMeNot"[1] last year.The same issues with TrackMeNot apply to Hayneedle, including potential false positives, and list of word combinations that can be filtered out easily, and well, the list goes on.[1] http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/08/trackmenot_1.html
-- /* * mdh - Solitox Networks (Lead Project Engineer) * Facts often matter little, in the face of fervently held perceptions */