No Such Thing as a Free Lunch.
Written: Apr 05 '00
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To put it bluntly, I was a member right up to the point when, as Yahoo! proclaimed its purchase of GeoCities, it also decreed that all existing GeoCities web sites (and the materials contained therein) would become Yahoo! property. As soon as my personal Paul Revere told me about this little stunt, I immediately flushed my entire GeoCities web site down the toilet. There was, of course, a feeding frenzy of free web providers who pointed out that they make no such presumptions about their member's web sites, and Yahoo! was forced to recant this declaration shortly thereafter.
Since then, I have visited various GeoCities web sites from time to time. The content, more often than not, was either of good quality or showed a lot of effort on the part of the webmaster. Unfortunately, I can't visit a GeoCities site without a separate window popping up and sucking down some bandwidth in order to show me an advertisement. In addition, I make my browser ask my permission before it sets cookies, and every GeoCities link I follow -- both to a GeoCities site and to additional pages within a GeoCities site -- generate several requests to set a cookie. I don't even want to think what kind of tracking information they collect when I visit without using Anonymizer.com. It simply strikes me as being very intrusive. Ironically, Yahoo! does not allow you to use your GeoCities account or web site to collect or store personal information about other users.
In addition, GeoCities does not (nor has it ever to my knowledge) allow its users to write and install their own CGI scripts. While I can certainly understand that Yahoo! isn't interested in taking the security risk, there is free software out there, like CGIwrap, that you can use to add a layer of security on top of your server's existing CGI support. You can't ever completely protect against malicious CGI programming or visitors who try to exploit security holes left by inexperienced CGI programmers, but if it was really that big a problem then you would be hard-pressed to find an ISP that let its customers install their own CGI scripts.
I have to admit I haven't tried any other free web site providers since GeoCities; then again, after the GeoCity experience, can you blame me?
Recommended:
No
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About the Author
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