I took off my clothes and stepped into the shower to find another one sitting near the drain. It was about 2 feet tall and made of metal, with bright camera-lens eyes and a few dozen gripping arms. Worse than the Jehovah's Witnesses.
"Hi! I'm from Google. I'm a Googlebot! I will not kill you."
"I know what you are."
"I'm indexing your apartment."
"I don't want you here. Who let you in?"
Robot Exclusion Protocol
This is awesome: Robot Exclusion Protocol:
Tags: robots
Current Music: Gary Numan -- Dominion Day ♬
10 Responses:
I think a rolling pin would have been more satisfying as the implement of destruction. But I concur, it is still teh awesome.
A tape of jwz playing with his life sized Stallman doll. The mind reels. Or maybe with a love lump version of Stallman. No, wait. That hurts too much.
Ah, 'tis not the place for the story of Stallman, The Odour, and the shop of manga figurines...
a gross fetishization. in the (near) future the system will be just introspecting itself, no googleanalysis needed.
Gotta love a short story that (effectively) ends in a DoS attack.
a good comment that is perfectly suited to the post at all.
Great story!
hehe. what a cool future that will be, thats so much cooler than finding roaches in your bathtub.
I take it that you, for one, do not welcome our snooping omniscient robot overlords ?
Alas, snooping video arms are so much cooler than something that discreetly rolls by and notes the responses to an RFID ping.
I'm indirectly responsible for the Robot Exclusion Protocol.
See, back in 1993 I had discovered (a) the web, and (b) perl. And I was writing a robot instead of doing my real job (writing documentation for SCO OpenSewer 5.0).
I lived, at the time, in Watford, a suburban satellite town of London. (One of SCO's software development groups used to be in Watford -- before SCO turned into Tarantella, sold the crown jewels to Caldera, and vanished to be replaced by a brain-eating zombie). In 1993, SCO had a 64Kb leased line.
I was poking around the web at the time, and by brain-dead stupidity I was spending a lot of time on Martin Kjoster's web page about robots. So when I wrote my first spider I turned it loose on a depth-first traversal and stupidly pointed it at a page including links to his site. As Martin's site was hosted by his employer, who had a mere 14.4K leased line (those were the days!) I tended to hammer him whenever I ran a test.
Eventually Martin emailed me. "Don't do that," he said. "Here is a protocol: grab the /robots.txt file and ignore all files listed in it, or else."
So I did that, and stopped annoying Martin, and meanwhile between us we had created something horrible (because XML hadn't been invented and I was still a crap programmer as opposed to an average one, and I was still learning Perl).