Britain's Conservatives Scrub Speeches from the Internet 234
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? (Score:3, Insightful)
Where's the torrent file?
And let's not forget why: (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
1984 (Score:5, Insightful)
“He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.” George Orwell, 1984
Re:Doesn't that kinda defeat the point of the arch (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And let's not forget why: (Score:5, Insightful)
When was the last time a political party (or even an individual politician) did anything else?
Re:1984 (Score:3, Insightful)
He who controls the spice controls the universe.
Not in the USA! (Score:5, Insightful)
http://www.seattlepi.com/national/article/Rumsfeld-denies-making-claims-Iraq-had-WMDs-1202942.php [seattlepi.com]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CU0m6Rxm9vU [youtube.com]
Re:Wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
I like your optimism.
They'll find a way to close that to public access (except "on a need-to-know basis" and to Royal family members, staff, and "security" officials) too, as soon as they see how embarrassing (or criminal) parts of the archive may be. Clearly, they always find a way, however brutish [slashdot.org].
Re:And let's not forget why: (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately this is usually not the case at all; the responsible, capitalist and hard-working ones only lead those wealthy few to become more wealthy.
This is a truth I think conservatives should realize and embrace, so that we can actually come up with real solutions to problems.
Re:Where's the torrent file? (Score:5, Insightful)
I dunno, but I'm guessing none of these politicians have ever heard of the Streisand Effect.
Re:Where's the torrent file? (Score:5, Insightful)
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. [wikipedia.org]
Re:Archive.org should not respect robots.txt (Score:5, Insightful)
Winston Smith's job / 1984 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Where's the torrent file? (Score:5, Insightful)
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. [wikipedia.org]
Oh they have, but instead of feeling appalled, they just get a hard-on.
Re:Archive.org should not respect robots.txt (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Doesn't that kinda defeat the point of the arch (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Archive.org should not respect robots.txt (Score:4, Insightful)
When robots.txt is used for censorship, it no longer deserves any respect.
It's not censorship when I tell robot data scrapers to bugger off and not abuse the website I run by copying every image I have and looping through the multiple links that take people there, or to invoke a program that generates data on they fly tens of thousands of times a day to the detriment of real users who actually have an interest in the information and can't get it because some robot is using all the available server processes.
I hope more people decide to ignore them.
The day that the first scraper starts ignoring mine, his IP is going into the firewall. If he tries to be a sneaky shit and use multiple IPs, then the site where YOU could come get data for free may very well go away, and you wind up with nothing. Neither I nor my employer have the spare bandwidth and cpu cycles to have every robot come download the Tb of data I have on the web. If free public access becomes an abuse of the server, the free public access goes away.
We should never let other people decide what we can see and hear.
When you are talking about my data, I have every right to decide whether you can see or hear it. It is your attitude of entitlement that makes me always have second thoughts about putting anything on the web. Most people are reasonable, decent people who appreciate the service. Some think they have a right to demand it.
Re:Where's the torrent file? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.