Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

A lot of Dems talk about what the media tells them to talk about. Not helpful.

I know this must be bad for Joe Biden, I just don’t know how.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

The republican caucus is already covering themselves with something, and it’s not glory.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

If you are still in the GOP, you are an extremist.

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

Let’s finish the job.

I didn’t have alien invasion on my 2023 BINGO card.

I wonder if trump will be tried as an adult.

“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.

You cannot shame the shameless.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

Battle won, war still ongoing.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

Prediction: the GOP will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Open Thread: Using ‘1984’ As An Instruction Manual…

Open Thread: Using ‘1984’ As An Instruction Manual…

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… And killing irony dead. I’m kinda hoping someone with better tech skills can explain why this is impossible (it is Sky News, after all):

The Conservatives have attempted to hide 10 years of speeches from the internet, it has emerged.

The speeches, news stories, press releases and blogs, which date back to 2000 until the party came to power in May 2010, have been hidden from public view on the Conservative Party website.

They have also removed the record of their past speeches from internet search engines, including Google, according to Computer Weekly…

The removal of such a large collection of speeches will fuel speculation the Tories are attempting to make it difficult for people to hold them to account to pledges made ahead of the 2010 election with the 2015 vote looming.

In addition the archive of information has been erased from the Internet Archive, which is the public record of the internet.…

Some of the speeches involved are those made by David Cameron and George Osborne in which they campaign to use the internet to make politics more transparent…

Reader Interactions

54Comments

  3. 3.

    Spaghetti Lee

    They have also removed the record of their past speeches from internet search engines, including Google, according to Computer Weekly…

    Yeah, um, I’m with you in the “how is this happening” boat. Doesn’t Google determine its own content rules and the Tory Party doesn’t have executive veto power over them, because why would they?

    Anyway, stuff like this is when techie-libertarians come in useful. I predict a follow-up story about how the documents have been liberated by someone from 4Chan or Reddit.

  5. 5.

    Violet

    The Conservatives have attempted to hide 10 years of speeches from the internet, it has emerged.

    Well, that’s a perfectly weasel-y use of the passive voice. How exactly did it emerge? Who “emerged” it?

  6. 6.

    Spaghetti Lee

    Also, as long as the N*wsm*x Feed is there, it can at least be used for unintentional comedy. ‘Obama’s Job Performance; Approve or Disapprove?” “O.K., that’s 5% approval to 95% disapproval, and in the 5%, most people cited their reason as ‘He’s obviously the Antichrist, which means I’ll finally be proven right about the Rapture happening in our lifetimes. We at Newsmax will adjust our content accordingly.”

  8. 8.

    MikeJ

    It would be interesting to read what Computer Weekly wrote instead of what Sky said they wrote. There’s nothing in the sotry about google other than the assertion above. The Internet Archive is not “the public record of the internet” as claimed. From the very beginning they’ve respected robots.txt files, as they should.

    It’s not surprising to see the tories running away from what they’ve said, but this is a shit story.

  10. 10.

    fka AWS

    I have found the quality of the Internet Archives’ Wayback Machine to be exceedingly spotty, so I wouldn’t be surprised if some shit was missing, but I don’t know exactly how they’d go about removing shit that was there.

    Ahh, this explains it:

    The specialist computer magazine explained that the Tories had used something called a robot blocker to remove the speeches, which effectively hides speeches in a “secretive corner of the internet like those that shelter the military (and) secret services”.

    This writer knows nothing about computers or the web, apparently.

    ETA: By “extremely spotty” I mean they’ll have random dates for a news site front page, which doesn’t help much except to get an idea of what it looked like.

    ETA 2: I would assume some of this stuff would be available on other public web sites like the Parliament?

  11. 11.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    @Violet: I know, it was such a blatant example that I actually misread it at first as saying that they’d attempted to hide the public record on their speeches, but it has emerged anyway.

    Bet it all does, for that matter.

  13. 13.

    MikeJ

    The CW story: http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240208976/Conservative-Party-slammed-for-erasing-its-internet-history

    The entire thing seems to be about changing their robots.txt file. I like scoring political points on them, but there’s a difference between not handing out three year campaign lit on street corners and 1984.

    BTW, if you’re working on a campaign, whether it’s a presidential or a state legislature race, you’re committing malpractice if you aren’t making your own complete copy of your opponent’s web site every day. (Please use a variety of IPs and throttle your request speed so you don’t look like a DOS.)

  15. 15.

    James Hare

    Sorry but there is no “there” there. It is common practice to block off portions of a website using robots.txt. Archival material and multimedia files are often blocked because they’re not material you’re really trying to get crawled all the time.

    The Internet Archive obeys robots.txt files because anyone running a bot to crawl content is supposed to. Not obeying a robots.txt file is making unauthorized access to a computer system, which is a crime.

    This is not the Conservative party trying to hide anything. Most likely it’s their web host trying to limit traffic to web crawlers.

  16. 16.

    Baud

    OT: I wasn’t expecting this from WaPo (via TPM):

    CBS News aired a misleading report on Monday about security issues concerning the federal health insurance exchange website based on leaked partial transcripts of a health care official’s testimony, according to the Washington Post.

  17. 17.

    fka AWS

    @James Hare:

    The Internet Archive obeys robots.txt files

    I’m surprised the IA retroactively honored a changed robots.txt file, removing past content like that.

  18. 18.

    Kay

    @Baud:

    that’s how it is now, for CBS News. They just make stuff up.

    Did you see this? Everything they said on the Benghazi story was wrong.

    Another questionable assertion in the “60 Minutes” report was Logan’s unsourced reference to the Benghazi Medical Center as being “under the control of al Qaida terrorists,” an assertion that McClatchy correspondents on the ground at the time and subsequent reporting in Benghazi indicates is untrue.

    So is she just a crazy person?

  19. 19.

    Warren Terra

    I’m actually quite shocked by this, from the Computer Weekly story @MikeJ linked above:

    “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 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,” it said.

    I mean, obviously every reputable webcrawler respects robots.txt exclusions – but why the fnck would Archive.org retroactively remove from their results some pages, just because several years later the current version of the page is now excluded?

  20. 20.

    MikeJ

    @fka AWS:

    To exclude the Internet Archive’s crawler (and remove documents from the Wayback Machine) while allowing all other robots to crawl your site, your robots.txt file should say:

    User-agent: ia_archiver
    Disallow: /

    (of course that works for only restricting some subdirs too)

    http://archive.org/about/exclude.php

  21. 21.

    Yatsuno

    @Kay: Pfft. You think this will be enough for Huckleberry Closetcase and Grand Theft Issa to give up their Crusade? They BELIEVE Obummer did something wrong here! And they WILL bend reality to their wills! IMPEACH THE NI-CLANG NAOW!!!

  22. 22.

    Roger Moore

    @Spaghetti Lee:

    Yeah, um, I’m with you in the “how is this happening” boat. Doesn’t Google determine its own content rules and the Tory Party doesn’t have executive veto power over them, because why would they?

    I know you can block Google from indexing your data by including a robots.txt file, and I believe they will normally honor requests to remove stuff from their cached copies. AFAIK, that is considered to be standard behavior for search engines because the material they’re indexing is normally under copyright and there’s always a chance of a lawsuit if the copyright owner objects. I don’t know about The Internet Archive, but I wouldn’t be that surprised if they had a similar policy for the same reason.

  24. 24.

    fka AWS

    @Roger Moore: The copyright argument makes some sense. However, the ComputerWorld article doesn’t make it clear whether the content is still somewhere on the CP’s web server, accessible if you knew the URL. If they wanted to take it down, they didn’t need to robot.txt it, they could just take the subdirectories off the site.

  26. 26.

    Mike in NC

    @Violet:

    Conservatives have attempted to hide 10 years of speeches from the internet, it has emerged.

    “Mistakes were made.”

  27. 27.

    MikeJ

    @fka AWS:

    If they wanted to take it down, they didn’t need to robot.txt it, they could just take the subdirectories off the site.

    It would have still been on archive.org had they not added the robots.txt file.

  28. 28.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    They BELIEVE ObummerHillary Clinton did something wrong here! And they WILL bend reality to their wills! IMPEACH THE NI-CLANGBURN THE WITCH NAOW!!!

    Fixed it for ya.

  32. 32.

    Felanius Kootea

    @Kay: No, she just works for an organization who hired a former Fox News VP to be its “News” VP. I expect things at CBS to get much worse.

  33. 33.

    Mike in NC

    @Yatsuno:

    You think this will be enough for Huckleberry Closetcase and Grand Theft Issa to give up their Crusade?

    I saw an article today where yet another Tea Party candidate (the fourth to date) has decided to try to unseat Huck, so he must be sweating bullets right now. Expect him to push for bringing back DADT any day now to mollify the loons.

  34. 34.

    Suffern ACE

    @Yatsuno: Nope. They’re moving on to Heartless Hillary Ignored her Friend’s Request for Security and Shot Him Like She Shot Vince Foster.

  35. 35.

    MikeJ

    The Internet Archive was unavailable for comment. But a fortnight after Computer Weekly started asking its San Francisco HQ for an explanation, the Conservative speeches have begun reappearing on its site.

    An odd definition of Orwellian.

  40. 40.

    David Koch

    I tell ya, I love Palin. She’s the gift that keeps on giving.

    I don’t think I ever laughed harder then when she got the Paul Revere story backwards.

    but she’s outdone herself, the bungler. instead of launching of her phoney war on xmas she ended up launching a war on the Pope.

  43. 43.

    Kay

    @David Koch:

    I never watched CBS news, honestly, I like to read news better than watch, but I keep hearing “gold standard’ so I was buying that :)

    I’d love to know the real story. Who paid the liar? The publisher, but who else?

    Issa should do that investigation. I’d watch that.

  44. 44.

    David Koch

    @Kay: Their ratings have been in the toilet for years. They have apporx a 3rd of the ratings of their competitors. So they spent a ton of money on Katie Couric hoping to buy themselves market share and it failed. Desperate, they turned to the fixxed news model and that’s not working either.

  45. 45.

    Spaghetti Lee

    @Suffern ACE:

    Yeah, let ’em all feast on each other and win with a 30% plurality.

    From a larger perspective, it really reminds me how monumentally stupid the Tea Party is when there are four different dumbfucks fighting for the privilege to be the ‘Real Conservative’ alternative to Lindsey fucking Graham.

  46. 46.

    Chris

    @David Koch:

    I don’t think I ever laughed harder then when she got the Paul Revere story backwards.

    I just love that her supporters can’t ever just say “yeah, she misspoke/had a bad day, it happens to everyone” and move on. They have to immediately rush to talk about how the gobbledegook is actually a totally true Truth, and it’s just that the liberals and the liberal media are too dumb or elitist to get it etc etc etc.

  52. 52.

    RaflW

    @Kay:

    that’s how it is now, for CBS News. They just make stuff up.

    CBS has figured out that Fox makes as much or more from advertisers with zero content control, so why bother with the muss and expense!

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