One might wonder how Ms. Rimland managed to find the "up-yours-faq" on Nizkor's site. We happen to have the logs to our own webserver (of course), so we know exactly how it was done.

Someone from a certain city in Canada which shall remain nameless searched on "hacking" on March 3rd at 9:08 AM; then searched for "Up Yours" in various combinations at 9:18, 9:19, and 9:20 AM. This person was not Ingrid Rimland.

The search for "hacking" turned up nothing about net terrorism -- Nizkor is not concerned with such information except when we are the victims. What that search did was to reveal that this person was obviously looking for dirt on Nizkor, and did not stumble across this information accidentally.

After the first search on "up yours," this person should have been aware of the fact that Nizkor was mailbombed with this program, because that search turns up our "Encouragements" page as the fourth hit.

Unfortunately for us, this person chose not to access that page, choosing instead to go straight to the seventh hit, namely the "up-yours-faq" file (and no other).

By the early morning of March 4th, Ingrid Rimland knew about this page and had seen it. Ms. Rimland had all day to contact myself or another Nizkor administrator, to ask us why it was there. She did not. Instead, she rushed to judgement based on her information regarding one web page.

Was her contact from Canada lax in not examining the other hits on the search results page? Or was our Encouragements page, which makes everything clear, any harder to find than this "up-yours-faq" page? You may judge for yourself. Below are the exact searches which the visitor from this city in Canada performed on March 3rd:

• "hacking"
• "up yours"
• "up-yours"
• "up-yours-faq"

(Note that, if you are reading this after March 4th, 1997 the addition of these three pages to the system may change around the order in which our search engine finds "Up Yours" pages. But on March 4th, the "up yours" search yielded the Encouragements page in the fourth slot and the Up Yours FAQ in the seventh.)

Incidentally -- we could publish the server logs which reveal this obvious attempt to dig up dirt on our site. It would probably even be possible for us to find out who was responsible. But there are privacy issues at stake; most industry pundits think that publishing server logs without permission is a serious privacy violation. (And we agree with them.)

Because Nizkor does not engage in violations of netiquette, we will not reveal those logs publicly, nor publish the person's name if we discover his or her identity.

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