This page has been removed. Please refer to Time's own copy instead of this page.
For some reason, this page recently became very popular. Over the last five days, it received 150-200 visits per day, or 978 visits during early january alone. These were from 950 domains, which indicated an uncanny focus of interest.
Why so popular? I searched the web using Alta Vista, but failed to find any page (or news posting) that gave this URL out. Zilch. I e-mail some people whose systems were not closed to "finger -l @site" and could thus be identified from httpd logs. No answer. Finally, I added text to the top of the page, asking anybody to tell me where you got the URL from. Nobody answered. Not one. Several hundred people visited the page and nobody answered.
This, folks, is getting creepy. So the page is now gone. Poof. It was just a local copy of Time's article that I made so that my Cyberporn and Cybercensure summary page didn't give people 404:s in future. And since it violated Time's copyright, I can't very well keep the copy if it becomes this popular.
I'm still curious as to where you guys (and girls) got the URL from.
Since visitors are so quiet, my only guess is that somebody wants to make the article available without Time getting the credit for http hits, and is thus using search tools to locate other copies of it and posting the results on mailing lists or web pages hidden from spiders. Since my copy is the best one that can be found outside pathfinder (at least of those that Alta Vista can find), it became the obvious choice.
Do I win a cigar?