I'm getting confused... There's absolutely no way that a robot could get the person's username/password anyway. So the school need to fix what ever security bug they had.
Maybe I am not communcating clearly. I am equating the SUV to the information, not what could be done with the information.
The Question is How would google know whether or not it should index the page?? Did they say anything about robots.txt? They put some pages with students SSNs on it(What a lame thing to do..), they claim that the pages were password protected, We know that google is certainly not running a password hacking program along with web spiders, so most likely they(the school) left some loopholes in the system and the page were open to public access somehow, thats the way googlebot get pass thru the password protection and indexed pages.... Yepp I am with you, they should make googlebot a psychic bot.... I am not talking about their specific robots.txt, did you ask for their specific robots.txt, and again how do you know if they had prohibitated googlebot in the robots.txt ???
No, I did. Does Google read and abide by what is written in the robots.txt file - it tells Googlebot whether or not it should index the page - that is the pupose of robots.txt.
Right, getting into someone else's SUV and taking it is breaking the law. However accessing something that is PUBLICALLY available due to shitty coding is not.
I think we can assume yes, googlebot has always abided by my robots.txt and considering that they began the initiative... if they didn't it would've made a bigger story because then there's actually grounds.
But, do you have all the facts in this case? That is what I am asking for - some solid facts. If the school did not have their robots.txt set up correctly - then fine. Googlebot is not without problems - I dare anyone to show that it is perfect.
If robots.txt was the case it would have been told in that report as its an even bigger issue for the whole Webmaster community. Their knowledge of internet security seems so lame that I really think they dont even know about robots.txt. Instead of using secure dadtbase servers they were using docushare, and they were dependent on the password security. “One of the students on the list had a presence on the Web,†I dont know what does it mean..but may be it was one of their Student who knowingly or unknowingly leacked out the password/access on her page for googlebot to follow the docushare server....
Even if the student did leak out the password, a googlebot wouldn't save it and use it to get access.
Sorry, but robots.txt was around way before Google was even a bad idea -> http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/mailing-list/robots-nexor-mbox.txt Not to nitpick - but Google did not begin the initiative.
googlebot dont save "Passwords" but if there is a link kike - http://www.lamerzzz.com/lame.php?uid=IamLame&pwd=kickmyass then it would follow the link...