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,
embarrassment 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Norman Brightside has gone into hiding and withdrawn the data sets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"