Advertisement

Harvard Takes Down Controversial Web Site

"There was no pornography on there," he said. "There was no sexually explicit material."

Even if University officials felt the site was inappropriate, he said, he deserved to be notified beforehand.

Advertisement

"Nobody bothered to contact me," he said. "It's really funny that the Harvard administration never...got my side of the story, my opinion."

"They could have just removed that directory or changed access," Williamson added. "The standard nettiquette for something like that is for an individual to contact the webmaster or system administrator of the server."

Although the University usually hosts only Harvard-affiliated sites, officials said they made an exception for Williamson's site as a service to the Internet community.

"It was an exception to our normal policies, because it was not something that was directly related to our part of the University," Van Baalen said.

The site, Packet Storm Security, had drawn hundreds of hits a day, and Williamson said he was having difficulty finding someone else with the technical capacity to host the site.

"It seems that nobody has the bandwidth or the hardware," Williamson said.

Recommended Articles

Advertisement