RE: tarball of ArachNIDS available

[Nibar Anonymous <novalupo () yahoo com>]

Do Internet search engines have the permission to index websites (in Google's case, downloading and providing the 
cached copy) in bulk on a worldwide basis without prior permission of the owners? If you want to dig, you can probably 
mine a cached copy of all of whitehats.com right out of the Google cache. There's definitely a full snapshot provided 
by the WayBack Machine:

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.whitehats.com
http://web.archive.org/web/20010815164458/whitehats.com/ids/index.html

Who gave them the right to republish past versions of whitehats.com and everything else on the web? Pretty much 
everything not behind an id and password login gets indexed, cached, archived and potentially republished. The Grace 
Hopper pricipal (better to ask forgiveness rather than permission) has historically been applied on the Net. But then 
there's the "it's all fun and games until someone gets sued" principal lately as well.

I don't know the details in this instance. Ethically, we should respect the content owner's wishes and delete 
everything if he requests that we do so. I personally have no idea what the content originator's wishes (Max Vision, I 
think) are in this matter.

If it turns out that Max Vision wants all of the ArachNIDS stuff sent to /dev/null, then maybe we should consider 
putting together an alternative "freeNIDS" that is not based on the arachNIDS content? Remember back when Phil Katz 
(R.I.P.) tried to make the ARC format more accessible to PC bulletin board owners and users by writing the superior 
PKARC, PKXARC, etc utilities? The company (SEA?) owning the ARC format either sued him or threatened to sue him, so he 
created ZIP (PKZIP, etc) instead. ARC became irrelevant practically overnight.

FreeNIDS might be good idea anyway. Maybe the Snort folks (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) would consider sponsering soming 
like that? Also a license where if the company or individual maintaining the content where to go belly-up (or to jail, 
or chapter 11, 17, whatever), the content would be free (belong to the community) to be hosted and mirrored 
elsewhere/anywhere?




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