barryhunter

Did you look carefully at the date this was posted on the mailing list? :)

It's up to you if want to take the risk :)

There is always a risk in trying something new. It might never pan out, or disappear in a puff of smoke.

Nothing would happen if nobody took a little risk.

what does it used as the backend? The actual classification system used?

untick autoShuffle in the controls.

then link dropped on hn, to get even more traffic?

Anyone know the criteria for what sites are included?

There is a 'Technology' link in the footer.

Really nice implementation btw.

The logger was obviouslly there, it was deliberatly collecting the SSIDs and MAC addresses.

Possibly a debug option to log the whole packets added during development, and it was accidently left on in production.

Or the whole packet was always logged, a second process would then skim just extracting the SSID/MAC (correlating with GPS), and another process was deleting the raw logs. That third process failed.

A few big drives in teh data collection devices, and possibly nobody noticed where filling up a little too quickly.

Why? What is the point of this?

Surely the point of a 'signup' is to create an account able to login into a webapp (or similar)

This appears to just capture the details into a database. There isnt even an API to allow users to login to do something (eg to access a hidden download page)

... so really its just a Form data capture tool, ala wufoo, used for surveys or petitions sort of thing. Not signups.

That's not the same. It doesn't sneakily enable Google Analytics to monitor your visitors.

You also forgot to make it a clickable link to advertise the service.

tinyurl and other shorteners generally use a 301 redirect, which often does pass 'link juice'.

nofollow is usually under the control of the webmaster. Which may or may not be the same as the content creator.

Think forums and blog comments, as poster you generally have no control if nofollow is added to links. Usually it should be, but no garentee.

Also think of sites like twitter, facebook and g+, again you can't ensure that nofollow is added. Similally when that content is then copied or syndicated. You can usually hope that the copier will perserve the link itself, but they may or may not choose to 'nofollow' the copied link.

And lastly, 'bad' bots, may well ignore the nofollow anyway. It would have to be broken/clever bot to get the destiniation from donotlink

Why does there need to be a business case?

Its quite probable the engineer that built the layer has left (either Google altogether, or just to another team).

As its aged its started misbehaving, and nobody left is interested enough to figure how to fix it. Ultimately its easier just to ditch it than to maintain.

euthanasia rather than murder.

Oh, dear. reading the article again it does note the demo is not real.

/me wanders off to wipe egg off my face.