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."
Where's the torrent file?
People have used robots.txt to buy up domains they want to censor.
For example, this happened with partyvan.
How did they delete them from archive.org? Did they hack it?
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
Because that's what they did in that book.
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
Lucky they now have secret blacklists at every major UK ISP to block these. Think of the children that would be harmed by reading these speeches!
FTFA:
In a remarkable step the party has also blocked access to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, a San-Francisco-based library which captures webpages for future generations, using a software robot that directs search engines not to access the pages.
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
The White House and its UK equivalent has unfortunately enough power to order Google to "forget" about this as well.
This is not accurate. Speeches made in Parliament are archived in Hansard for a start. And there is no changing that.
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.
There's a theory out there that states that because most of what we do in the so-called Information Age is stored is somewhat fragile digital storage systems (as opposed to, for example, parchment) historians in the future will have very little to base their research on about our age, as most of the info will be permanently lost.
Well, hundreds of thousands of posts on BBS systems from the 80's and 90's are already gone, delete the Internet Archive and the Web is gone too, any thoughts?
It's not even a takedown request. IA will honor robots.txt totally and retroactively - if they have 10-15 years of archived data at a specific domain (or subdirectory on that domain), and someone puts up a robots.txt disallowing them access, not only will they refuse to archive it going forward, but they will remove all previously archived material from being viewable (I hope they don't actively remove it from their archive, but merely stop making it available).
FC Closer
No problem. Just look right here.
Have gnu, will travel.
We as humans are not able to "remember" back further than 100 years. I mean that you cannot get any information from anyone that would give you a clear, practical understanding of the mindset from 100 years ago. You can go ask your grandparent(s) things about the past, but the vocabulary that they use more than likely won't fit your vocabulary and therefor you will not be able to get the understanding that they're trying for. Maybe 100 years is to small, but it can't be far from the real number, plus it's nice and round ;)
In this way, our society(s) are going through life sorta like that movie Memento. All that has to happen is a slight variation of the real story, that would produce the same basic result, but with a new context - Christopher Columbus "discovered" America comes to mind. Perhaps the powers that be depend on this, and are looking to make that number (100 here) smaller.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
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
Actually no, those speeches don't seem to exist on the party website now either.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
I apologize for my mistake. Until just a few minutes ago, I was unaware that the Internet Archive agrees to RETROACTIVELY honor a robots.txt file. So once a robots.txt file restricts access to content, they voluntarily remove access to previously archived content from the archive. Here's the related item from their FAQ:
Some sites are not available because of robots.txt or other exclusions. What does that mean?
The Internet Archive follows the Oakland Archive Policy for Managing Removal Requests And Preserving Archival Integrity
The Standard for Robot Exclusion (SRE) is a means by which web site owners can instruct automated systems not to crawl their sites. Web site owners can specify files or directories that are disallowed from a crawl, and they can even create specific rules for different automated crawlers. All of this information is contained in a file called robots.txt. While robots.txt has been adopted as the universal standard for robot exclusion, compliance with robots.txt is strictly voluntary. In fact most web sites do not have a robots.txt file, and many web crawlers are not programmed to obey the instructions anyway. However, Alexa Internet, the company that crawls the web for the Internet Archive, does respect robots.txt instructions, and even does so retroactively. If a web site owner decides he / she prefers not to have a web crawler visiting his / her files and sets up robots.txt on the site, the Alexa crawlers will stop visiting those files and will make unavailable all files previously gathered from that site. This means that sometimes, while using the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, you may find a site that is unavailable due to robots.txt (you will see a "robots.txt query exclusion error" message). Sometimes a web site owner will contact us directly and ask us to stop crawling or archiving a site, and we endeavor to comply with these requests. When you come accross a "blocked site error" message, that means that a siteowner has made such a request and it has been honored.
Currently there is no way to exclude only a portion of a site, or to exclude archiving a site for a particular time period only.
When a URL has been excluded at direct owner request from being archived, that exclusion is retroactive and permanent.
couple that with the google cached copy of the site has a 'search for speeches' section which now is, interestingly enough, missing as well.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
No, they put robots.txt on their website and the Internet Archive respects robots.txt retroactively. If they had 20 years worth of data archived from one domain, and someone puts a robots.txt on the domain, all 20 years worth of data is removed from the archive. Whether it's actually deleted or hidden is unknown, but I hope it isn't deleted.
So there's no actual internet archive? How was this not planned for years ago?
It fully explains it. Someone bought up the domain that you were hosted on previously, added a blanket disallow in robots.txt, and suddenly all your old stuff is gone.
FC Closer
Indeed this is ridiculous that the IA would retroactively remove stuff though as you say hopefully just disable access instead.
I think the archive actually does just suppress access rather than purge the actual data, so they can again display it once copyright runs out (if it ever does...).
I also think the point is that newbies may not know about robots.txt and that even an experienced webmaster might accidentally allow access to something private long enough for it to get archived, or receive and honor a takedown notice, so this allows the correction of the error.
It's an 'archive' and should reflect how stuff 'was' at the time; legalities of that obviously being quite murky and hard to defend against expensive lawsuits, but still.
That's why. They have limited funds and need them to buy more disks and stuff, not fight lawsuits. If the choice is not display some stuff or go broke and not display anything, the choice is also obvious.
I wish, though, that they were able to detect when a domain changed hands and not honor robots.txt requests retroactively past the boundary. IMHO a new owner is a new web site that happens to have the same name.
Especially: I wish domain name parking sites didn't put up robots.txt files that cause the archive to immediately purge/hide the previous owners' content. I've lost access to a lot of content from dead sites that way. (It also keeps the owners from rescuing their old content if they don't have personal backups.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
what do you have to fear? 8)
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Not much of an archive if they delete the past because someone says it should be deleted. Even Wikipedia allows you to go back and see all changes to an article.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
I just tried to complain to my MP about this but it seems he's blocked me on Twitter. I guess that's it then, we are living in a fascist state.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
It makes Winston Smith's job at the Ministry of Truth more difficult if there are old archives available..
Small problem with your sig there ..
Firefox can't establish a connection to the server at isohunt.com
Archivists will exercise best-efforts compliance with applicable court orders Beyond that, as noted in the Library Bill of Rights, 'Libraries should challenge censorship in the fulfillment of their responsibility to provide information and enlightenment.'
Seems like this may just have slipped past them. Let's make sure they know they need to sort it out... Surely they only removed it from the Wayback Machine, not from the archive itself.
Oh, I'm sorry sir, I thought you were referring to me, Mr. Wensleydale.
Here in Canada, Conservative PM Harper has taken heat lately for breaking all the links on our government's historical archive of the legislation that's been posted for the past decade or two. It's just... gone. The entire archive, except for maybe the past 5 years worth.
That archive is public government information, not Conservative property.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
OTOH, this means that whenever reference is made to one of their speeches people can just insert scandalous bits. Objections by the Tories would be countered by pointing out that because they removed all copies from the Internet then anything they publish has been modified and is therefore not to be trusted. It should be easy to cultivate an aura of mistrust in anything that they say after that. Well, that is what I would do if I was Machiavelli. Or true to my username. :)
Bitter and proud of it.