Message-ID: <2014217.1075854936156.JavaMail.evans@thyme> Date: Fri, 21 Sep 2001 07:54:13 -0700 (PDT) From: whitney@thelaw.net To: mark.e.haedicke@enron.com Subject: Reverse Engineering... Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-From: whitney@thelaw.net X-To: mark.e.haedicke@enron.com X-cc: X-bcc: X-Folder: \MHAEDIC (Non-Privileged)\Deleted Items X-Origin: Haedicke-M X-FileName: MHAEDIC (Non-Privileged).pst From: Mark Whitney Homepage: http://www.thelaw.net Remove: http://www.thelaw.net/remove.htm Before we explain how we quickly found the answer to a subsciber's tough search question, by tracking down and lawfully reverse engineering a little known Department of Defense web site, we want you to know that between now and the end of the month, you can save $100 on TheLaw.net Convenience Edition. Regularly $495 - now just $395 buys an entire year of unlimited access to everything. ----Hand the software off to your paralegal at no extra charge. You both install at work, at home and on your laptop. ----If it's just you and one machine, our Solo Edition is just $345 annually - less than $1 a day. ----Search a proprietary case law database with a national scope, updated four times a day. ----Find cases that cite to your case in just a click or two. ----All with the security of an unconditional 30-day-money-back-guarantee ----Access every major-metro paper, international news, Federal statutes, rules, regs, the CFR, Federal Register, bill-tracking tools, thousands of forms, executive agency databases and much more, all neatly organized among the 50,000 additional non-case law documents and databases accessible with every subscription to TheLaw.net. ----If you have more than one attorney user to license, Workgroup pricing is published right here: http://www.thelaw.net/subscribe.htm ----For a published list of indexed jurisdictions see, http://www.thelaw.net/caselawgrid.htm. --"CAN YOU FIND DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE DIRECTIVE 6025.13?" All subscribers to TheLaw.net enjoy unlimited, free Reference Support - even to the point where we will quickly find the item for you if it's out there, even ones that are not accessible via the web's best search engines. Here's an interactive example of what we mean. We are particularly skilled at quickly scraping hard-to-find documents from among the two billion plus public web pages in just a few short keystrokes. Recently, for example, a subscriber submitted, over our website, a request for Reference Support, wondering if we could locate Department of Defense Directive 6025.13. Even our massive pre-configured drop-down menu system didn't include this little known document and our frustrated client explained that he's been searching for this item online for more than two years. Here's the process we deployed: 1. We went to Northernlight - one of the great search engines - http://www.northernlight.com 2. We entered - 6025.13 - as the search term, which returned less than two dozen hits from the more than one billion pages indexed by Northernlight: See, http://www.northernlight.com/nlquery.fcg?cb=0&qr=6025.13 3. We scrolled down the first page of results and Hit No. 5 caught our eye since the title of the page said: "Department of Defense" and the brief summary text made reference to 6025.15 (not 6025.13, but certainly close enough to warrant a mouse click) 4. Clicking Hit No. 5, we were transported to this page: http://web7.whs.osd.mil/text/i602515p.txt 5. We noted, based on the url structure, that we were definitely trolling deep through the subdirectories of a little known, but publicly available, U.S. Military web server. (Note the ".mil" extension in the root directory which identifies U.S. Military web servers). 6. We used the Find Function in our browser and jumped to every instance of 6025.13 in the document and noted that while the document had been excerpted on this page - it wasn't the official document we were looking for. 7. We peeled back the url from: http://web7.whs.osd.mil/text/i602515p.txt to: http://web7.whs.osd.mil/text pressed enter and received a message that said: "You are not authorized to view this page" 8. So we again peeled back the url from: http://web7.whs.osd.mil/text to: http://web7.whs.osd.mil and received a message that said the site had been moved to: http://www.dtic.mil/whs/directives We happily noted the word "directives" in the new url and clicked the link. 9. Paydirt. We landed on the Defense Department's Washington Headquarters Services, Directives and Records Division. 10. From the homepage we clicked the link captioned: Directives 5000.1 - 8999.99 which took us to this page: http://www.dtic.mil/whs/directives/corres/dir2.html 11. Again, using the browser's Find Function, we jumped directly to the link for Directive 6025.13, click and landed here: http://www.dtic.mil/whs/directives/corres/html/602513.htm 12. We selected the PDF version, which took us here: http://www.dtic.mil/whs/directives/corres/pdf/d602513_072095/d602513p.pdf --THE UPSHOT After printing the document, we noted the domain from our final destination: http://www.dtic.mil and returning to Northernlight, we entered it as a search term and noticed that the web server we ultimately found had never been indexed by Northernlight. This U.S. military site may well be blocked from indexing robots or it may simply be so new, that Northernlight's spider has not yet crawled the site. No wonder our guy had such a tough time! --SUMMARY This search was particularly successful because within about 90 seconds we found the official version of what we were looking for. However, had we NOT been able to find the document using our checklist of efficient search techniques, it would have still been a win for our client. Why? Because we would have been able to all but rule out the possibility that the desired item was available on the public web, saving him hours of hunting and pecking. We can do the same for you. And what about cost? What did all of this cost our client? Absolutely nothing. We provide our clients with access to our Southern California Development Center via our software, our web site, email and a dedicated toll free line. The day you subscribe, we become your virtual partner with an eye toward building a business relationship that has teeth. Self-serving? You bet. 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Check our publicly available Reviews and References at: http://www.thelaw.net and then easily subscribe online at: http://www.thelaw.net.fulfillment.htm or call in toll free with any questions and we'll book the subscription for you: 1.877.4.LAWNET [877.452.9638]. We know you're busy, we appreciate the consideration and above all, we wish you well in the weeks ahead. Yours in Liberty, Mark Whitney President and CEO TheLaw.net Corporation San Diego - Chicago, USA Toll Free 877.452.9638 Fax: 858.452.6249 whitney@thelaw.net http://www.thelaw.net "Information Retrieval Solutions for the Legal Profession" **************************************************************** PRIVACY STATEMENT: TheLaw.net respects your time and we believe this is the fastest, least intrusive method of originating contact with busy professionals. But we also provide several mechanisms allowing recipients to remove themselves easily and at no cost. 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