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"It is impossible".

"It is quite difficult".

"We work hard to prevent it".

It is exactly the same as behaviour security companies had in the past until they learned that, to quote Adidas, 'impossible is nothing' and that 'quite difficult' is nonsense due to automation.

It used to be quite difficult to stage a DOS (anyone remembers the first one Yahoo! suffered in 2000?, ah, those were the days when we were surprised by them...). Nowadays a bunch of kiddies can put amazon down on its knees.

Well, probably not amazon.




"When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?" - (attributed to John Maynard Kaynes)

The algorithm has changed. The web has changed. Naturally, google has changed.


It is not a problem of a change in reality. It is a problem of wrong statements:

'It is impossible' is certainly false on the internet for almost anything you can think.

'It is very difficult': See the sysjail fiasco [1]. Once something is deemed possible, it is not very difficult, on computer systems.

So, it is not the facts that have changed, it is their perception by Google.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sysjail


Or, the ranking algorithm was previously designed for this not to have an impact, and as real-world usage showed abuse, they changed it. Repeat this cycle until now. So the techniques to game the algorithm changed, hence the algorithm changed, hence the stance changed... Constantly, we don't live in a static web.

(EDIT: Also of note is the fact that this change was from a year ago, and the previous one was in 2003 ... So. Yeah)




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