I can understand the hassle & expense of defending a site's bandwidth allowance from a greedy public. I don't know the solution to that problem, but John, your suggested grab-bag of Draconian solutions seems like an infuriated site admin wrote it in the dead of a bad night.
The attempt to pull a "Tragedy of the Commons" put-down of research- gathering technology is a little bit of an overreaction. From a journalistic or academic perspective, it's absolutely imperative that the public, individuals and organizations can have access to archived versions of historical documents. The fact that these web documents are public in the first place makes that argument stronger. And the fact that not everyone, everywhere can do it all the time without crashing the web, unfortunately, doesn't automatically make it an immoral practice. For my part, I was trying to download the contents of a page that I was currently looking at. That would actually reduce my bandwidth usage vs constantly returning to the site and re-loading it. Of course, the site owner would have the opportunity to change it in the meantime. That my attempts to archive ended up gathering tons more data than I wanted is the problem I was trying to solve, not exacerbate. PS John - if you're so strongly against "information-gobbling onanism," why are you reading nettime? ;-) -Flick * FLICK's WEBSITE & BLOG: http://www.flickharrison.com * FACEBOOK http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=860700553 * MYSPACE: http://myspace.com/flickharrison # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected]
