So I posted a search on Bing today, so check some statistics , like I would with Google. You know, you search for a unique term, and then search for it in conjunction with another unique term, and you look at the denla, and you learn something.
Well I learned something alright. Lo and behold, Bing didn't like my search. Instead of results I got a plain white page that said:
We are seeing an increased volume of traffic by some malware software. In order to protect our customers from damage from that malware, we are blocking your query. A few legitimate queries may get flagged, and for that we apologize. Please be assured that we are hard at work on this problem and hope to get it resolved even better as soon as possible.
Imagine my suprise. I wonder if there will be a large collection of blue towncars and Bill Gates dressed like Wolverine in my driveway in the next ten minutes. Seriously, if I vanish, check for pieces of my DNA in Steve Ballmer's bathroom.
This is a lesson to those of use looking to the Internet to be the be-all and end-all of storage devices. Remember, you don't OWN crap. Jason Scott said it best in his blog post Fuck The Cloud, so I won't repeat it here. Be warned that if you post something that someone doesn't like, and they own the box, no law on earth is going to keep them from doing damn well what they want with it.
For now, my default search engine is Google, and I publish my information to servers I can touch.