Norman Brightside, a little known UK blogger from the London (near England), was reeling yesterday from a cataclysmic, violent (yet unwanted) backlash of media inspired attention from Web 2.0 types in response to the impromptu and inadvertent release of 1367 GB of search data (including IP addresses, referrer data, explicit search terms and agent identifiers) from the Web server farm that hosts his incredibly popular blog.
Brightside is an IT genius who had developed his Web server tracking technology using advanced AI techniques to include the screen name of the AOL user, the room they were actually surfing from, what they were actually thinking, the strength of each individual key press together with the facial expression used when typing in search terms.
Data Mining analysts have been busily crunching the data continuously for 37 hours using Oracle Mega-Grid technology and a bank of powerful Cray Supercomputers. Details have been forwarded to Interpol and, in a curious twist, Blackburn Football Club, who are now being linked with Ashley Cole.
Norman’s mum, Norma Jean was distraught:
‘Oh I can’t believe our stupid son, Norman, has brought shame, embarassment and pestilence upon the Brightside family name. I knew he had a blog but how could he have been so stupid ?’
Although the data was de-personalised, analysts predicted that simple business intelligence and sophisticated cryptography techniques (1=‘A’, 2=‘B’ etc) would quickly reveal the end user issuing each individual search query, who could then be subject to prosecution, hanging and the immediate loss of his Telewest subscription.
Norman Brightside has gone into hiding and withdrawn the data sets from all public Web sites. He issued the following short press release from The Priory Clinic, London.
‘I’m really, really sorry. I don’t know what came over me. I simply didn’t think my blog had that much traffic. I think there must be a problem with the WordPress statistics which seem to be under-reporting. My only defence is that my error might have been caused by the excessive heat in my hotel room. I have carefully backed up and deleted all the data now.’
However, high bandwidth mirror sites, located all around the world, are thought to still contain multiple copies of the full, unadulterated search data.
And finally, if you don’t want to risk imprisonment, death or a call from the NSA, here is that earth shattering search data published in full.
65.214.44.29 - - [07/Aug/2006:01:20:17 +0100] “GET /blog/ HTTP/1.1” 304 106 “Why didn’t United buy Own Hargreaves” “Mozilla/5.0”
72.30.98.202 - - [07/Aug/2006:01:21:57 +0100] “GET /blog/ HTTP/1.1” 304 106 “Who is Norman Brightside” “Opera 9.0 Beta 2”