Unethical idea of the day: ‘The Forbidden Web,’ a search engine that only indexes files disallowed by robots.txt files. For example, CNN’s robots.txt file asks search engines to avoid their transcripts, jobs, website statistics, and development directories. The Forbidden Web would index only those forbidden (and often intriguing) directories. Evil, isn’t it?

A glance at the robots.txt files on some popular sites: New York Times, Google, Hotwired, eBay, Slashdot, Verisuck, Kuro5hin, Filepile, ZDNet, Epinions, IMDB, BBC, IBM, USA Today, Jakob Neilsen.

You can search Google for more robots.txt files.

A Playstation 2 emulator for Windows/Linux is being developed by the authors of PCSX, a Playstation 1 emulator. It only runs some simple demos at the moment, but it’s amazing that it exists at all. No word on a functional Xbox emulator yet…

In 1992, Sabeer Bhatia posts a classified ad from his Stanford e-mail account offering his ’88 Toyota Tercel for sale. In June 1996, Jack Smith mentions Hotmail for the first time in Usenet. One month later, on July 4, they publically announced the product they created. Three years and eight million users later, they sold Hotmail to Microsoft for $400 million. It’s a good story, if you haven’t read it already.

Denoser is a Perl script that filters out the noses from emoticons. And you thought Ben Trott’s Silly::Die module was useless…

In the spirit of Leslie Harpold’s recent Verisign debacle and David Gallagher’s successful campaign to get his name back, I’m starting a Googlebombing campaign of my own.

Help me defeat Scott Baio and get my name back! Burn, Chachi, burn! (Baio! Baio! Baio!)