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Author Topic: The most disturbing news story I've read all year  (Read 13362 times)

40hz

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The most disturbing news story I've read all year
« on: November 14, 2013, 12:41 PM »
In Orwell's dystopian 1984, Inner Party aparatchik O'Brien makes the now famous comment: “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.” in reference to the Ministry of Truth's constant reediting of records and news stories to "correct errors" and bring history "into alignment" with the present official truth.



Apparently, the practice has escaped the pages of fiction and has started making its way into the real world according to this story posted on Techdirt.


UK Political Party Tries To Dump 10 Years Of Speeches Down The Memory Hole
from the because-that-ALWAYS-works...-ALWAYS dept


Every so often a public figure will come to the dubious conclusion that the past can be erased. This was a difficult proposition even before the advent of the internet. These days, it's nearly impossible. But long odds rarely deter the particularly inspired… or particularly stupid.

Some abuse the easily-abusable laws in European countries to generate memory holes. Max Mosely has been fruitlessly pursuing the removal of so-called "not actually a Nazi orgy" photos for years. Others simply blunder around, issuing baseless legal threats and questionable DMCA notices. Others, like the UK Conservative Party, do their own dirty work.

Being willing to wipe your own collective memory takes a special kind of bravery, the kind often associated with reckless acts shortly preceded by the phrase, "Hold my beer."

pixelpusher220 was the first to send in the ComputerWeekly story which details the efforts the UK's Conservative Party recently made to eradicate an entire decade's worth of speeches from the internet.

    
The Conservative Party has attempted to erase a 10-year backlog of speeches from the internet, including pledges for a new kind of transparent politics the prime minister and chancellor made when they were campaigning for election.

    Prime minister David Cameron and chancellor George Osborne campaigned on a promise to democratise information held by those in power, so people could hold them to account. They wanted to use the internet transform politics.

    But the Conservative Party has removed the archive from its public facing website, erasing records of speeches and press releases going back to the year 2000 and up until it was elected in May 2010.

All fine and dandy you may think. We still have The Internet Archives don't we? Nothing can ever be truly erased from the web as long as the IA saw it first, right?

Well...according to the article, the answer appears to be: Don't be so sure.

The Conservative Party did more than simply delete the speeches from its site. It also blocked out Google and the Internet Archive using an extensive addition to its robots.txt.
.
.
.
So, how did it get the Internet Archive to remove its historical collection, something ComputerWeekly writer Mark Ballard likens to "sending Men in Black to strip history books from a public library and burn them in the car park?"

Well, apparently the Internet Archive treats changes to robots.txt files as retroactively applicable. Once the bot blocker informed IA it was no longer welcome to crawl these pages, it erased the corresponding archives as a "matter of courtesy."

By making this change, the Conservative Party was able to eliminate 1,158 "snapshots" the Archive had gathered over the last 14 years, a rather breathtaking eradication accomplished without ever having to strong arm internet historians or stare down Google directly.

The Conservative Party has offered no comment on the slash-and-burn of its own history, simply saying it has passed along the query to its "website guy."  <more>

A very disturbing story...and harbinger of things to come once this bit of info makes its way into government circles. Especially those governments which claim to be most in support of "transparency." :'(
« Last Edit: November 14, 2013, 12:46 PM by 40hz »

dr_andus

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Re: The most disturbing news story I've read all year
« Reply #1 on: November 14, 2013, 04:08 PM »
Look on the bright side. At least they are no longer polluting anybody's mind with all that nonsense  ;)

dr_andus

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Re: The most disturbing news story I've read all year
« Reply #2 on: November 14, 2013, 04:12 PM »
But more seriously, isn't this just calling for a Streisand effect? As it turns out, there is always a copy of it somewhere, and this sort of behaviour will just make historians, activists etc. be more mindful with their archiving, and new tools will be developed to prevent governments to get away with this sort of thing.

I bet they already regret that they've done this...

TaoPhoenix

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Re: The most disturbing news story I've read all year
« Reply #3 on: November 14, 2013, 10:33 PM »
Naw, posted without reading the thread (sorry!), the whole 1984 theme is So Past Due ... that we have to go to the more extreme SF works to find our Salvation.

I don't know what they are. Only that I won't be here in seven years time so use me well while you got me!


barney

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Re: The most disturbing news story I've read all year
« Reply #4 on: November 14, 2013, 11:17 PM »
the whole 1984 theme is So Past Due ...

I wanna live in your reality!  It's already here in mine.

IainB

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Re: The most non-disturbing news story I've read all year
« Reply #5 on: November 18, 2013, 03:10 AM »
^^ Might be much ado about n'owt. Apparently Entire Conservative Party Web Archive Still Available - at the British Library - though both Cons and Lab sites have scrubbed their websites (and why shouldn't they?).
The Register covers it here, but with what seems to be a bit of ad hom:
(Copied below sans embedded hyperlinks/images.)
Oh My GOD! Have the TORIES ERASED THE INTERNET?*
Pass the Lizard-proof tinfoil, I need to make a hat
By Andrew Orlowski, Kelly Fiveash, Lewis Page, 13th November 2013

A story that the Conservatives “made the internet disappear” has ignited news channels today. In fact, the story demonstrates yet again how ignorant most journalists are of the basic workings of the internet - and it demonstrates how the thirst for conspiratorial thinking dominates political news.

Perhaps not surprisingly, this story comes from freelance blogger Mark Ballard, writing for twilight IT site Computer Weekly. Mark used to be a journalist here at The Register: he had to leave some years ago, but we remember him well.

Ballard reports in classic style that the Conservative Party has "erased" a bunch of old speeches from the "internet". Sky News, picking up Ballard's post, tells us how “the Tories had used something called a robot blocker to remove speeches”, echoing the crazed conspiratorial tone of the Weakly's coverage - which adds:

    The erasure had the effect of hiding Conservative speeches in a secretive corner of the internet like those that shelter the military, secret services, gangsters and paedophiles.

In fact, it's simpler than that: the Tories just dumped all their old speeches off their website and put notices in their robots.txt file notifying webcrawlers ("the robots" that the Tories "blocked", if you've wandered in here from somewhere else) to do the same in their parent archives around the internet**. Mark and other scribblers at the Beeb, Sky, Guardian, BuzzFeed etc were stunned to find that this meant the speeches were no longer available at the Wayback Machine, which they had fondly imagined to be "the internet", and to serve as an imperishable archive of everything ever published online.

But this is business-as-usual. The shock and horror is generated by a misconception: that the internet in general, and the Wayback Machine (aka the library hosted by non-profit firm Archive.org) in particular, are bulletproof repositories of information. The word "archive" implies permanence – a fortress of data integrity impervious to time, war and large egos. But Archive.org is not an archive. It never has been.

We found this out nine years ago. The Wayback Machine is very fragmentary, and - of course - removes information on request. On that occasion the PR department of chip giant Intel had requested that a three-year-old interview with an engineer be removed. Wayback complied – as it does every time. After all, it seldom has any right to copy and republish content scraped from other people's websites.

There are other reasons why it's no surprise that the Wayback crawlers comply with robots.txt files on websites: if a crawler doesn't, it is liable to be blocked by all right-thinking webmasters. Dubious bot crawlers often try to pretend not to be robots, so that they can ignore robots.txt, but this isn't simple - they are often detected by alert web admins or their systems - and that's a dangerous route to go down when you're claiming to be a reputable organisation.

So there are good bots and bad bots, on the real internet. But not on Mark Ballard's. He writes:

    The bots were what made the democratization of information possible. It was bots that inspired Cameron and Osborne. It was bots that were going to free us from serfdom in the way they said we would be. Without the bots you just had pockets of power and privilege for those in the know. Without the bots you just had the same old concentration of wealth and power there had always been, since long before the Internet Archive started taking snapshots of the Conservative website in 1999.

Knockabout stuff. And the Tories taking all their old promises off their website - and updating their robots.txt to reflect this - would almost be a small piece of news on a slow day, though all the "erasing the internet" and "criminals and paedophiles" foolery is absurd.

Except it would only be fair to note that the Labour Party has "erased the internet" too. Labour’s housecleaning has removed almost everything prior to the start of the current leadership, and the Wayback Machine (sorry, "the internet") is pretty empty of Labour's past as well as that of the Tories.

So, not really even news: "political parties scrub away all their old promises as long run-up to election begins". Boring.

If we’re to hold politicians to account then this means proper, rational debate. That means, yes, keeping a record of what they say - but you're better off taking your own copies than relying on robots and the varied cloud systems they serve to do it for you - and then complaining that someone has "erased the internet" like a "criminal paedophile" when you are let down.

But people would normally much prefer a conspiracy to blame. Once it was the Right that dealt largely in the language conspiracy theories, as Democrat historian Richard Hofstader wrote in his famous 1964 essay The Paranoid Style in American Politics. There were Reds to be found under every Bed. But listen to any academic venting about “neoliberalism” and you can just as easily erase the word “neoliberal” and substitute the word “Illuminati”. It's escapism and a form of narcissism, really.

Every conspiracy theorist finds the conspiracy their heart desires, eventually. Readers may be interested to note that when Mark left the Reg, he took with him several folders of notes, and left behind quite a lot more.

The ones he took with him were all labelled "Military Industrial Complex", followed by sequential serial numbers. ®

*Headlines to which the answer is no.

** Newcomers might care to have a look here to learn more about the robot exclusion protocol, which "is not intended for access control, so don't try to use it as such. Think of it as a 'No Entry' sign, not a locked door."

At Guido Fawkes There's also a post which follows on from The Register's post, here: Labour Delete Entire Pre-2010 History From Their Website.
(I'm not sure whether the Lab site material is saved in the British Library too, like the Cons one.)

40hz

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Re: The most disturbing news story I've read all year
« Reply #6 on: November 18, 2013, 05:11 PM »
The Register is a little too intent on strutting its geek. So much so that they've entirely missed the point being made by the TechDirt article. Apparently it's in the interest of showing any newbies that The Register knows how the "robot exclusion protocol" (Ooooh I love it when they talk like that!) actually works.

Contrarian.jpg

But that's to be expected of The Register, which often seems to feel the need to stake out a contrarian position on roughly three quarters of what is being reported and discussed elsewhere. Reminds me of an aunt of mine who could argue on any subject - and change her position at the drop of a hat if the debate was ever in jeopardy of consensus being reached.
 ;D
« Last Edit: November 18, 2013, 05:18 PM by 40hz »

superboyac

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Re: The most disturbing news story I've read all year
« Reply #7 on: November 18, 2013, 05:19 PM »
 ;D :(  :mad:
Max Mosely has been fruitlessly pursuing the removal of so-called "not actually a Nazi orgy" photos for years.

superboyac

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Re: The most disturbing news story I've read all year
« Reply #8 on: November 18, 2013, 05:22 PM »
I have faith in one thing...
there are fanatical archivists all over the world. 

IainB

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Re: The most disturbing news story I've read all year
« Reply #9 on: November 18, 2013, 08:27 PM »
@40hz:
The issue as you described it seemed to be that it was a dystopian 1984 moment - "The most disturbing news story I've read all year", you called it.

Now, I apologise if I had not conveyed the points very well, but, at the risk of repetition:

So, if it's in fact not "the most disturbing news story you've read all year" after all - as seems to be the case - then does the erasure of the history of the Cons and Lab parties' websites (and the Cons material at least is in the British Library) have any real significance other than that it is housekeeping on the run-up to the elections?
I can't see that it does - though I could be missing something here, of course.
What is the issue now?

40hz

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Re: The most disturbing news story I've read all year
« Reply #10 on: November 19, 2013, 05:49 AM »
I can't see that it does - though I could be missing something here, of course.
What is the issue now?

I think it may be more that I hadn't made my concern sufficiently clear.

What I found disturbing was the policy of the Internet Archive to delete information in their archive upon request "as a courtesy."

Not being a UK citizen (and Britain's government not being as meddlesome and intrusive a force on the international stage as a certain other government is) I could frankly care less what the UK Cons or Labor parties do or say.

But what I am concerned about is how willingly something like the Internet Archive goes along with revisionist scrubbing requests from those who do not wish to let their historic political record stand.

Bad practice. Bad policy. Bad move, Internet Archive. Shame! ;)
« Last Edit: November 19, 2013, 07:46 AM by 40hz »

IainB

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Re: The most disturbing news story I've read all year
« Reply #11 on: November 19, 2013, 03:18 PM »
@40hz: Ah! Sorry. I think I see what you mean now.
I had originally thought that the Wayback machine might be a permanent one-way archive, but then I realised that quite a lot of stuff never seemed to make it into the archive in the first place, and then I later discovered that was probably because the rules set up in the  robots.txt file (or something) were things that robots/crawlers would have to obey (apparently not because of any statutory obligation, but because of a "professional" obligation). Later, when I was researching a "bad science" investigative website that had shut down because of legal threats from lawyers acting for some of the bad/fraudulent scientists whom it apparently exposed, I discovered that, though most of the website was in the archive, the offending parts of it had apparently been expunged.

What that seemed to indicate was that, not only was http://wayback.archive.org/ a necessarily passive robot custodian of what website owners wanted to permit its crawlers to access by default, but also that they would action any and all subsequent requests for expunging archived content.

I could be wrong in some of the above, because I have deduced a lot of it from experience. I don't know it for a verifiable fact.

What I was unaware of until reading the posts I linked to, was that putting a rule into a website's robots.txt or something, to block the Archive from crawling that website, could/would necessarily be used to force a retrospective expunging of all previous archived material from that website.

My new awareness on this point means that I have just turned from being a strong supporter of Archive.org to being an indifferent non-supporter.
I mean, what's the point? Humanity's creative drive to monetize everything has led to an entirely new and dominant market for ubiquitous e-commerce that has been created and developed in the www. However, according to the Pareto principle, roughly 80% of website content is likely to be puerile rubbish and 20% of it useful facts/truth. The www has moved from the original state of being a repository of, and a communications medium for scientific truth/research, to the point where facts/truth would seem to have become victims of a wave of absurdity/irrationality. For example, you only need to look at the evidence of irrationality/absurdity in comments and information posted in the Science/Peer Review and Thermageddon subject threads in the DC Forum.
Sure, it's great to be able to have a sort of discussion - e.g., like in this particular discussion forum thread I am posting to now - with different people somewhere else in the world whom you've never met and might never meet. That at least is something we couldn't so easily do in pre-Internet times; but is the quality of the discussion really any better than if you were face-to-face? Is there less absurdity/irrationality or more? Take it to an extreme and ask the same questions of Twitter. There is a stochastic tendency in Nature for things to "regress to the mean" (e.g., with IQs). On the Internet, it seems to be regression to mediocrity/orthodoxy of content (e.g., as in Wikipedia).

The reality that "...putting a rule into a website's robots.txt or something, to block the Archive from crawling that website, could/would necessarily be used to force a retrospective expunging of all previous archived material from that website" means that truth (history) will be and is already being deliberately expunged/manipulated, as in the 1984 scenario.
Which I guess is the point you were making.      :-[

“He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

“Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”

― George Orwell, 1984

1984 not an instruction manual.jpg

IainB

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Re: The most disturbing news story I've read all year
« Reply #12 on: November 19, 2013, 06:39 PM »
This discussion reminded me of the case of Prof Richard Parncutt, who revealed himself as an éminence grise Climate Fascist at U-Graz:
per Wikipedia:
Richard Parncutt (born 24 October 1957 in Melbourne) is an Australian-born academic who specializes in the psychology of music. He has been Professor of Systematic Musicology at Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz in Austria since 1998. He attracted international media attention in 2012 for his advocacy in favour of the death penalty. (Discussed in the Thermageddon thread in the Basement.)
Amongst the types of people he considered should be put to death for their perceived sins, Parncutt especially had in mind "climate denialists" for the death penalty - to be adjudged by a suitable panel of climate "scientists" - I kid you not.
His simultaneously revealing and damning "rationale" (if that is the correct term) for this was documented for all to see in a page on his university website from 25 October to 24 December 2012.
Of course, after that date it was taken down from the university website, and expunged from Archive.org when people belatedly, but probably unsurprisingly objected to it, and Parncutt has since apparently been "disciplined" (QED) by the university board. However, the offending page showed up in Google Cache for a while and can still be seen in all its splendiferous context at Webcite: WebCite query result

Unfortunately: WebCite will stop accepting new submissions end of 2013, unless we reach our fundraising goals to modernize and expand this service.

So it looks as though the apparently more permanent/reliable archive (Webcite) may be about to be shut down, whereas the apparently less permanent/reliable archive (Archive.org) has recently been (apparently) quite well-funded.
Now I find that a little strange, in light of the above discussion.

Parncutt could no doubt be pleased about it though:

Climategate - the smiling face of Fascism - Prof Richard Parncutt.jpg

One lesson here is probably to be a habitual archivist for the important stuff that catches your attention whilst reading news feeds, etc., and to share those archives publicly.
I have faith in one thing...
there are fanatical archivists all over the world.  

mwb1100

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Re: The most disturbing news story I've read all year
« Reply #13 on: November 19, 2013, 09:06 PM »
Keep in mind that archive.org sees itself mainly as a librarian, not as an "information watchdog".

archive.org follows the "Oakland Archive Policy":

Online archives and digital libraries collect and preserve publicly available Internet documents for the future use of historians, researchers, scholars, and the general public. These archives and digital libraries strive to operate as trusted repositories for these materials, and work to make their collections as comprehensive as possible.

At times, however, authors and publishers may request that their documents not be included in publicly available archives or web collections.  To comply with such requests, archivists may restrict access to or remove that portion of their collections with or without notice as outlined below.

Because issues of integrity and removal are complex, and archivists generally wish to respond in a transparent manner, these policy recommendations have been developed with help and advice of representatives of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Chilling Effects, The Council on Library and Information Resources, the Berkeley Boalt School of Law, and various other commercial and non-commercial organizations through a meeting held by the Archive Policy Special Interest Group (SIG), an ad hoc, informal group of persons interested the practice of digital archiving.

In addition, these guidelines have been informed by the American Library Association's Library Bill of Rights http://www.ala.org/work/freedom/lbr.html, the Society of American Archivists Code of Ethics http://www.archivist...dbook/app_ethics.asp, the International Federation of Library Association's Internet Manifesto http://www.unesco.or...2/ifla_manifesto.rtf, as well as applicable law.

Clearly the people who drew up this policy put a lot of serious thought into the ethical, legal and historical ramifications of the policy. And they appear to have done so in an inclusive and open manner.

They aren't necessarily evil just because their goals aren't quite what you might have thought.

IainB

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Re: The most disturbing news story I've read all year
« Reply #14 on: November 20, 2013, 02:28 AM »
...Clearly the people who drew up this policy put a lot of serious thought into the ethical, legal and historical ramifications of the policy. And they appear to have done so in an inclusive and open manner.
They aren't necessarily evil just because their goals aren't quite what you might have thought.
_____________________
I suspect that @40hz might have had his tongue firmly in his cheek when he wrote:
...Bad practice. Bad policy. Bad move, Internet Archive. Shame! ;)

Many thanks - the info. you provide helped reduce my level of ignorance about Archive.org and confirms and explains why Archive.org is "...the apparently less permanent/reliable archive" as I described it - that is, it's effectively incorporated in their charter.

By the way, I have since looked further into WebCite: ("...the apparently more permanent/reliable archive")
  • Why it is thus is described in their charter as documented in the FAQ.

  • They have a funding/donation site at FundRazr. The comments there are worth a read. They apparently plan to migrate to an infrastructure based on Amazon A3. There is a comment:
    Thank you! We are on track to reach our initial fundraising goal. Please keep giving to make sure we are able to archive new material in 2014 & beyond!

As discussed in their FAQ, WebCite seems to be focussed on an approach to creating more permanent records for academic citation purposes, of general academic information/knowledge/research, rather than the broad-brush "suck it all in" of the Archive.org (and remember the Pareto principle).

I always rather liked the idea of the mythical Hall of Records, said to be buried under the Great Sphinx of Giza,
rumoured to house the knowledge of the Egyptians on papyrus scrolls and the history/knowledge of the lost continent of Atlantis.
I reckon we have the technology and the opportunity to create our own Hall of Records for the future, but Archive.org probably won't be able to cut the mustard if the knowledge is progressively and relentlessly deliberately destroyed/expunged from it by people intent on covering the truth of their shame or criminal/political intent or propaganda, or whatever.

So @40hz could find in WebCite an approach to offer perhaps more than a glimmer of hope for avoiding the dystopian 1984 future that he is concerned about, though whether WebCite will succumb to an onslaught from an emergent 1984-type of Totalitarian fascism, only time will tell.
Some people (not me you understand) might say that the odds for WebCite in that regard don't look too good really, and they might further give the example of the American Constitution as an illustration of something existing that doesn't seem to have held up all that well against such an onslaught, but I couldn't possibly comment.

40hz

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Re: The most disturbing news story I've read all year
« Reply #15 on: November 20, 2013, 05:21 AM »
I reckon we have the technology and the opportunity to create our own Hall of Records for the future, but Archive.org probably won't be able to cut the mustard if the knowledge is progressively and relentlessly deliberately destroyed/expunged from it by people intent on covering the truth of their shame or criminal/political intent or propaganda, or whatever.

FWIW, it's my understanding that the Internet Archive's willingness to remove information from their collection 'on request' was largely motivated by the desire to avoid any legal challenges to their scraping content - even though I'm pretty sure they could make a successful argument for 'fair use' under US Law if somebody actually did go after them.

Beware those killer rabbits I suppose....

killer-rabbit-2.jpg

Don't you think this policy has an almost Pythonesque ring to it...to wit:

When danger reared its ugly head
He bravely turned his tail and fled.
Yes Brave Sir Robin turned about
And gallantly he chickened out.
Yea bravely taking to his feet
He beat a very brave retreat!
Bravest of the brave - Sir Robin!


(With thanks to M.P  ;D)
« Last Edit: November 20, 2013, 05:26 AM by 40hz »

IainB

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Re: The most disturbing news story I've read all year
« Reply #16 on: November 20, 2013, 05:59 AM »
...FWIW, it's my understanding that the Internet Archive's willingness to remove information from their collection 'on request' was largely motivated by the desire to avoid any legal challenges to their scraping content - even though I'm pretty sure they could make a successful argument for 'fair use' under US Law if somebody actually did go after them.
Yes, absolutely.
Unless and until they changed their charter to some different principles, they cannot be anything else other than "...the apparently less permanent/reliable archive".
An archive is generally only of any use if the stuff you would reasonably expect to have been safely stored in it is actually reliably and consistently available/accessible when you go looking to access it.
Otherwise, as I said, "What's the point?"

40hz

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Re: The most disturbing news story I've read all year
« Reply #17 on: November 20, 2013, 11:01 AM »
There was a time when certain newspapers were thought of as the paper "of record." The New York Times used to be considered one.

Unfortunately, even the NYT has begun the practice of unacknowledged edits to published news articles after the fact on their website. And I've been given to understand most other major newspapers also do so.

No wonder our politicos see the world as just one more manifestation of the virtual reality they apparently dwell in. With no fixed record of the past, the present and future are perpetually up for grabs and subject to change without notice.

Very 1984-ish that. Or mystical since many mystic traditions consider everything to be illusion. Nice to see the 'guardians' of the historic record are doing so much (by doing so little) to make it that way.

Sorry if I come across being narked about the IA. It only looks that way because I am.  >:(

Stoic Joker

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Re: The most disturbing news story I've read all year
« Reply #18 on: November 20, 2013, 12:08 PM »
No wonder our politicos see the world as just one more manifestation of the virtual reality they apparently dwell in. With no fixed record of the past, the present and future are perpetually up for grabs and subject to change without notice.

And while those in power can easily tailor their own historical "truth" as needed, the people beneath them are stringently held hostage by emaculate records of their every waking hour to be sure that at all points they both can and will be held accountable for the merest of miss-steps.

Yeah...that's just a teensy bit one-sided me thinks.

40hz

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Re: The most disturbing news story I've read all year
« Reply #19 on: November 20, 2013, 01:32 PM »
Yeah...that's just a teensy bit one-sided me thinks.

Yup. I think that's called: "Business as usual!" IIRC.

IainB

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Re: The most disturbing news story I've read all year
« Reply #20 on: November 20, 2013, 03:26 PM »
...Sorry if I come across being narked about the IA. It only looks that way because I am>:(
Well, I don't blame you for being a bit narked about it. I was too, but only because it destroyed my silly belief that things were otherwise.

As I wrote:
My new awareness on this point means that I have just turned from being a strong supporter of Archive.org to being an indifferent non-supporter.

...and I want my donations back, as I would not have wanted to donate had I been aware of what I now understand. False pretences. It was carefully hidden in plain view behind all the hype. I really should have known better than to rely on belief. Gullible.

IainB

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Re: The most disturbing news story I've read all year
« Reply #21 on: November 20, 2013, 03:37 PM »
And while those in power can easily tailor their own historical "truth" as needed, the people beneath them are stringently held hostage by emaculate records of their every waking hour to be sure that at all points they both can and will be held accountable for the merest of miss-steps.
What, "every waking hour" from from birth to death?
Would that include things such as, for example (say) birth certificates, citizenship records, religio-political affiliations and scholastic records?
Just wondering.    :tellme:

Stoic Joker

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Re: The most disturbing news story I've read all year
« Reply #22 on: November 20, 2013, 05:01 PM »
And while those in power can easily tailor their own historical "truth" as needed, the people beneath them are stringently held hostage by emaculate records of their every waking hour to be sure that at all points they both can and will be held accountable for the merest of miss-steps.
What, "every waking hour" from from birth to death?
Would that include things such as, for example (say) birth certificates, citizenship records, religio-political affiliations and scholastic records?
Just wondering.    :tellme:

Between the NSA, FaceBook, Google Glass, the new HIPAA laws, and the DMV ... I'm going to go with yes on that.

40hz

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Re: The most disturbing news story I've read all year
« Reply #23 on: November 21, 2013, 03:54 PM »
And while those in power can easily tailor their own historical "truth" as needed, the people beneath them are stringently held hostage by emaculate records of their every waking hour to be sure that at all points they both can and will be held accountable for the merest of miss-steps.
What, "every waking hour" from from birth to death?
Would that include things such as, for example (say) birth certificates, citizenship records, religio-political affiliations and scholastic records?
Just wondering.    :tellme:

Between the NSA, FaceBook, Google Glass, the new HIPAA laws, and the DMV ... I'm going to go with yes on that.

You left out pecker measurement. They got that too I'm sure. ;D

Stoic Joker

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Re: The most disturbing news story I've read all year
« Reply #24 on: November 21, 2013, 05:05 PM »
And while those in power can easily tailor their own historical "truth" as needed, the people beneath them are stringently held hostage by emaculate records of their every waking hour to be sure that at all points they both can and will be held accountable for the merest of miss-steps.
What, "every waking hour" from from birth to death?
Would that include things such as, for example (say) birth certificates, citizenship records, religio-political affiliations and scholastic records?
Just wondering.    :tellme:

Between the NSA, FaceBook, Google Glass, the new HIPAA laws, and the DMV ... I'm going to go with yes on that.

You left out pecker measurement. They got that too I'm sure. ;D

That got covered (/measured) in the LG thread ... Damn panda had a camera in it too...