Slashdot Mirror
Britain's Conservatives Scrub Speeches from the Internet
An anonymous reader writes news of an attempt to erase a bit of history. From the article: "The Conservative Party have attempted to delete all their speeches and press releases online from the past 10 years, including one in which David Cameron promises to use the Internet to make politicians 'more accountable'. The Tory party have deleted the backlog of speeches from the main website and the Internet Archive — which aims to make a permanent record of websites and their content — between 2000 and May 2010."
because they broke almost all of their pre-election promises.
The most important thing to learn about the Tory party in the UK is that, contrary to popular opinion, it is not the party for the responsible, the capitalists, nor the hard-working (except in the sense that they want most people to work hard for them). It is a party representing a few wealthy individuals, and their mission is not small government, but privatised government, where nothing happens without their masters getting a cut.
Sorta like a mafia.
“He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.” George Orwell, 1984
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
No, but the Wayback Machine always respects takedown requests. Note that the British Library maintains an archive of UK sites, and still has the speeches in question (from April 2008 onwards):http://www.webarchive.org.uk/wayback/archive/20080410100951/http://www.conservatives.com/tile.do?def=news.speeches.page
Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it.
In the U.S., politicians post speeches full of lies online, and nobody cares. I'm not sure if this is because everybody believes the lies, or because nobody believes the politicians.
http://www.seattlepi.com/national/article/Rumsfeld-denies-making-claims-Iraq-had-WMDs-1202942.php
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CU0m6Rxm9vU
I dunno, but I'm guessing none of these politicians have ever heard of the Streisand Effect.
No sig today...
I dunno, but I'm guessing none of these politicians have ever heard of the Streisand Effect.
I dunno, but I'm guessing none of these politicians have ever heard of 1984.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Robots.txt should be respected at the time of retrieval. It should not be retroactively respected to censor or remove old data. That is a shame. I've used the Archive before on a site of a gaming company that I loved, which nearly went bankrupt (or perhaps did) but managed to eke its way through. Part of their relaunch nuked the Internet Archive's archives and I definitely felt a sense of loss.
Perception is the thin dividing line between reality and fiction.
I dunno, but I'm guessing none of these politicians have ever heard of the Streisand Effect.
I dunno, but I'm guessing none of these politicians have ever heard of 1984.
Oh they have, but instead of feeling appalled, they just get a hard-on.
Robots.txt should be respected at the time of retrieval. It should not be retroactively respected to censor or remove old data. That is a shame. I've used the Archive before on a site of a gaming company that I loved, which nearly went bankrupt (or perhaps did) but managed to eke its way through. Part of their relaunch nuked the Internet Archive's archives and I definitely felt a sense of loss.
Yeah, I had the silly impression all this time that the entire purpose of the Internet Archive was to archive the goddamn Internet precisely so that people couldn't pull this kind of retroactive erasure "cleansing of history" bullshit and get away with it.
What a dope I am. It's amazing how inadequately we are protecting our freedoms and our history these days. If we don't do something much more drastic our grandchildren will end up being slaves to some theocratic corporatocracy and they'll have no idea that the world was ever any different.
Lately I think Orwell was overly optimistic.
The UK Tories under Cameron are indeed appalling. It is hard to decide if they are merely incompetent or malicious. Their actions of late point to the latter. Indeed one could only speculate how bad it would have been without the LibDems.
The UK political scene has always been a bit foreign to my German tastes. A backbench MP suggesting that feckless fathers should be dragged to work in chains in defense of the badly executed bedroom-tax would have been forced to apologize in German politics. And he would have lost his seat come the next election. The comically idiotic ads targeting "illegal" immigrants to turn themselves in are both malicious and incompetent. And even now there is another push to introduce the "snooper's charta" which in the light of the recent revelations about the GCHQ isn't even needed for them to do what they do.
The other paries in the UK look good in comparison because of the unmitigated disaster that is the current Tory crop. Thatcher was bad but potentially a necessary evil due to the unmaintainability of the Postwar Dream. But think as I may I can't begin to fathom where to start to look for a justification for that cabinet, that PM and that party. They do not even have the use of a compass needle that permanently points to the south. You can't say "let's do the opposite of what they are suggesting" due to the utter confusion that is their politics.
20 minutes into the future