Scribes
saurabh is a manic- depressive graduate student with delusions of
overturning well- established social hierarchies through sheer weight of cynicism. in his spare time he writes self-effacing auto- biographical blurbs.
dan makes things up casually, effortlessly, and often. Never believe a
word he says.
hedgehog burrows between San Francisco and other areas rich in roots and nuts. His father says he is a literalist and his mother says he is very smart. Neither of them say aloud that he should spend less time with blegs and more time out of doors.
Pollocrisy
Blegs
- scrofulous
- wax banks
- a tiny revolution
- under the same sun
- alt hippo
- isthatlegal?
- informed comment
- abu aardvark
- crooked timber
- bob harris
- saheli: the gathering
- john & belle have a blog
- red state son
- pharyngula
- critical montages
- living the scientific life
- pass the roti
- attitude adjustor
- pandagon
- this modern world
- orcinus
- a lovely promise
- ufo breakfast
- sabdariffa
- to do: 1. get hobby, 2. floss
Links
Archives
- 11.2003
- 04.2004
- 05.2004
- 06.2004
- 07.2004
- 08.2004
- 09.2004
- 10.2004
- 11.2004
- 12.2004
- 01.2005
- 02.2005
- 03.2005
- 04.2005
- 05.2005
- 06.2005
- 07.2005
- 08.2005
- 09.2005
- 10.2005
- 11.2005
- 12.2005
- 01.2006
- 02.2006
- 03.2006
- 04.2006
- 05.2006
- 06.2006
- 07.2006
- 08.2006
- 09.2006
- 10.2006
- 11.2006
- 12.2006
- 01.2007
- 02.2007
Search
Site Feed
Rhinocrisy
|
13 March, 2006
Tealeaf
At times, I have thought it would be handy to run a search engine that trolls government web pages and -- in real time, not with some 6-month delay -- lets users see how a page has changed. In particular, it would automatically alert users when web content disappears.
(As someone shows in Jonathan's comments, the page didn't disappear from everywhere, just from all *.mil sites.)
The U.S. government is in a censorship frenzy*. Sometimes I think a very clever person could divine what they're worried about from seeing what they censor. But the page Jonathan refers to is mystifying. Would the Pentagon really take down an entire interview with their Secretary in order to (ineffectively) hide one not-very-embarrassing sentence? It's hard to believe and it's also possible, given the current environment. When in doubt, leave it out -- of the public record.
(As someone shows in Jonathan's comments, the page didn't disappear from everywhere, just from all *.mil sites.)
The U.S. government is in a censorship frenzy*. Sometimes I think a very clever person could divine what they're worried about from seeing what they censor. But the page Jonathan refers to is mystifying. Would the Pentagon really take down an entire interview with their Secretary in order to (ineffectively) hide one not-very-embarrassing sentence? It's hard to believe and it's also possible, given the current environment. When in doubt, leave it out -- of the public record.
Comments
Man, I love the commenters there.
I thought Jonathan was kiddng when he listed the interviewer as Plum TV--as in, what a plum interview arrangement, they don't even point it out when you idiotic things. But no, it really is a network for kissing up to people like Rumsfeld .
I think such a search engine would be incredibly costly, scale baadly, and be subject anti-bot scripts.
In the mean time we can give an occasional hand to Steven Aftergood et al.
Posted by Saheli
I thought Jonathan was kiddng when he listed the interviewer as Plum TV--as in, what a plum interview arrangement, they don't even point it out when you idiotic things. But no, it really is a network for kissing up to people like Rumsfeld .
I think such a search engine would be incredibly costly, scale baadly, and be subject anti-bot scripts.
In the mean time we can give an occasional hand to Steven Aftergood et al.
Posted by Saheli
Actually it would be pretty trivial to write such a spider. I could probably do it by breaking robots.txt support in 'wget' and writing a few perl scripts in about two hours. After that you just need a sufficient amount of archive space. If you're just keeping diffs and exluding PDFs, etc., this isn't really a HUGE amount of space... I don't think it would be undoable, though it would require way more resources than any individuals like us have to spare.
Posted by saurabh
Posted by saurabh
exluding PDFs,
Hmm. That seems problematic. I'm always shocked at how very much information is stored in this format.
How much space would you need just to track changes? How would you stop from being blocked?
Posted by Saheli
Hmm. That seems problematic. I'm always shocked at how very much information is stored in this format.
How much space would you need just to track changes? How would you stop from being blocked?
Posted by Saheli
Yeah, PDFs are a pain. They're everywhere.
* I don't remember why I put that asterik there, but I need to close the tag, as it were.
Posted by hedgencrisy
* I don't remember why I put that asterik there, but I need to close the tag, as it were.
Posted by hedgencrisy
