Yay! I'm first! ;-)
On a more serious note...
For this assignment, you will be working on programs that communicate over the Internet to real live World-Wide Web servers. There are several implications of this:
- The Internet and web servers can sometimes become unavailable, and so it is possible that your programs will occasionally fail to reach a given web site.
- Web sites change all the time, and in fact a lot of web pages are generated dynamically. For example, the CMU SCS web site at http://www.cs.cmu.edu has a dynamic component that is randomly chosen, every time the web page is requested by a client. This means that your program can get different results when run multiple times on the same web site.
- It is possible for your program to cause great damage to a web site, and to CMU's Internet access. For example, if 100 15-211 students were all to run their search engines on a small-capacity web server at the same time, this would likely result in a denial-of-service to other clients. Also, some Internet service providers try to detect malicious use of the web, and if so, they filter out all traffic from a subnetwork. Thus, there is the potential to deny a large segment of the CMU campus access to a particular web site.
So, the bottom line is that you should be careful, and you of course must behave ethically. By allowing you to develop and test your code on the real Internet, we are making this a more interesting and realistic homework assignment. But your obligation, then, is to behave like a good member of the Internet community. Accidents can happen, of course, but you are required to do your best to make only appropriate use of the web.
If youhvae any questions about this, please don't hesitate to post them here. |