October 26, 2004

The Death of Deletion

OOPSLA XIX Memewatch (Installment #1)

The internet never forgets. The prospect of a parrot who siits on you shoulder should cause us to seriously think about refactoring the Fourth Amendment.

Like others here, I've been tinkering with Google's Desktop indexing tool. It's powerful, even wonderful, but rubs your nose in just how hard it is becoming to make things go away.

This is a lesson that ought to have been made clear to me a few OOPSLA's ago when I was party to accidentally exposing the URL's a series of purportedly anonymous reviews to the all-seeing eyes of the Google bots. Once anything leaks out of the bottle, its next to impossible to get it back in.

Still, I've been realizing I use my harddrives as if they were worm drives. An embarassment of storage riches is but one prong in the advance of this age of abundance...


Sure I could just Google it, but I like to listen to the way Grandpa tells it...
--Thomas Jay Peckish II

Posted by foote at October 26, 2004 12:49 PM
Comments
I like this very much. Proof again that you are a strong and sensitive voice, one of very few within the cloister of silicon mandarins, who truly has a heart. Unless you're being ironic again, goddamit. Posted by: patrick owens on December 1, 2004 10:13 AM
Two levels of irony are nearly indistinguishable from sincerity, after all... Posted by: Thomas Jay Peckish II on December 1, 2004 12:43 PM
Post a comment