Big Brother is watching you
I don't know about you, but it came as a bit of a shock to me when I found out that Web pages can actually keep track of the Internet addresses of visitors. Some day, someone will unexpectedly confront me with the fact that I visited the alt.sex.hamster.duct.tape home page. Well, just to add to the reign of terror, here is my little list of visitors. Who knows, when you run for President, it may come out that you consorted with dangerous perverts like myself.
There is a service named the annonymizer which can be used to act as an internet proxy. You go to their web page and then access other Web pages from there. They forward the data to your local server, which makes it appear like you have accessed the site from www.anonymizer.com and your true address is hidden. So if you want to take a look at that multi-level marketing site without getting mass amounts of unsolicited e-mail or you want to check out the hamster-duct-tape love page, the anonymizer will hide your identity. Currently this service is free (I am not associated with the anonymizer service, by the way, I just stumbled on them via a link from a Brock Meeks article in HotWired (6/13/96)).
After making you paranoid, you may wonder what evil purposes I may be putting my "hit" list too. Evil chuckle. Actually, the answer is that the hit list gives me positive reinforcement. I have put a lot of work into my Web page. I have tried to provide content, rather than yet another personal home page with pictures of my Aunt Jan. What I get back is the ego thrill of seeing people from all over the world read what I write. It is also fascinating to see what pages get hit the most. There has been a lot of interest in my DXF and openGL software. Among the book reviews, the review of John Grisham's Rainmaker has been popular. My reviews of Back Fire: The CIA's Secret War in Laos and Its Link to the War in Vietnam and the related book Blond Ghost: Ted Shackley and the CIA's Crusades have been totally ignored. This sort of surprised me, since I thought that the CIA was up there with sex and UFOs in popularity on the Internet.
