Re: ActiveAgent

andy@andy.net
Fri, 8 Nov 1996 13:51:03 +0000

>From what I've seen, most of the people who are discussing this
haven't used the applet. Froma technical sense it is a fairly nice
hack. Thank god it isn't threaded better or it might be able to do
some real damage. It does do a fairly quick DFS, but it has to
process each page as it is pulled, so it really is not super fast and
should not pound a system too hard. I'm still not sure of a
beneficial application for it, but it is fairly slick. I did
decompile it (I'm not going to post the entire source, that would
probably get me in all sorts of hot water), and I found the:

FuckYouCypherWimps = "robots.txt";

line a bit disturbing. I honestly think HipCrime should be commended
for creating a novel new spider, but attitiudes need to change on
both sides of the issue. HipCrime needs to be a bit more responsible
and the traditional agent crowd needs to be a bit more supportive and
guiding to make sure that ActiveAgent sees its full POSITIVE
potential.

BTW: For those of you who are having problems running ActiveAgent
in a browser, it works far better in sun's java "appletviewer"

---------------begin code snippet------------

public ActiveAgent()
{
mailLimit = 23;
pageTotal = 1;
pageCounter = 1;
diving = false;
slidePressed = false;
floatPressed = false;
buttonPressed = false;
EmailAddressFound = false;
names = new List(4, 0);
links = new List(4, 0);
addrs = new List(5, 0);
namesExclude = new List(1, 0);
addrsExclude = new List(1, 0);
linksExclude = new List(1, 0);
urlField = new TextField(19);
msgField = new TextField(30);
retField = new TextField(19);
sendBox = new Checkbox("Send");
diveBox = new Checkbox("Dive");
proxyServer = "";
proxyNotice = "";
FuckYouCypherWimps = "robots.txt";
emailString = " Email Addresses found in MAILTO tags:";
emailOne = " Email Address found in MAILTO tag:";
emailLabel = new Label(emailString);
agentName = "ActiveAgent (shareware model #0.09)";
}
}

--
Andy Warner
andy@andy.net
http://www.andy.net/~andy/