Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period.
It's a common annoyance: you follow a web link, but it's dead. There's nothing there. With a rapidly evolving, ever-changing internet, people revamp their sites daily, reorganising files and moving them without warning. Few of those people are helpful enough to construct automatic redirects to take us from the old page to the new one, and it takes a while for the automatic search engine crawlers to discover that things have changed – and even longer for sites that are maintained by human beings. Wikipedia, for example, estimates that around 10% of its outbound links are broken in some way.
The 404 error is the standard response from a web server when we ask it for something that it can't give us. That error message usually produces a page which, typically, looks something a bit like this. But with a bit of tweaking, 404 pages can be customised. And web designers seem to be quietly engaged in an unspoken battle to create 404 pages that are just as amusing, or distracting, or impressive as the site itself.
India's chaotic capital city is currently gripped by the contoversy over the number of people being killed while riding on or waiting for its fleet of private buses. Already this year 97 people have been killed and scores more injured. Things have got so bad that the city's highest court has now stepped in and demanded the authorities come up with a plan for phasing out the current ownership arrangements and introducing greater transparency within a month.
The Blueline buses in question are not a pleasant means of getting about. They are noisy, crowded, have no air conditioning and are often driven through the streets like a chariot by drivers who compete with each other to get to passengers first. They are, however, the only affordable means of transport for most of the city's 15m population. Every day, the buses carry 8.7m passengers. Yet campaigners say city officials have not only been negligent about
the safety of the buses, but have promoted cars at the expense of
promoting public transport.
RIAA. Four letters with the capacity to make music fans spit bile over their computer keyboards. Who are they? The Recording Industry Association of America. And why so controversial? They've dared to engage lawyers to pursue people who share copyrighted music online.
Most of the people who are contacted by the RIAA with evidence of their music sharing activities decide to settle out of court – indeed, so many are choosing this option that a neat little website has been set up that allows you to pay up via credit or debit card. But one 30 year old woman by the name of Jammie Thomas chose to fight in the courts; this proved to be an expensive mistake, and this week she was fined $222,000, or $9.250 for each of the 24 songs she was accused of sharing.
The fact that the RIAA actually won the case made filesharing fanatics explode in righteous indignation. "Screw the RIAA," said one, "fascism has arrived in America." Many trotted out the old line about how music itself should be free, and that musicians should somehow make their money from "gigs, merchandising and touring" – a hilarious concept for any band whose records don't feature in the top 40.
Most of us accept a certain amount of spam, even when we know that there's a spam filter battling against it. We know that the filters are automated, we know that they're not infallible, so when a clutch of indecipherable messages in cyrillic text arrive, we just wearily send them to the trash.
But the other symptom of a spam filter that isn't doing its job properly is the other extreme – you fail to receive important messages because, for whatever reason, they've been classified as junk. It may be because the sender has accidentally included the word "viagra" in the message, but sometimes it will be rejected for a more spurious reason.
Users of Microsoft's Hotmail service – or Windows Live Hotmail, as it now likes to be known – have suffered from this problem more than most. This might well be because Hotmail addresses receive proportionally more spam, and Microsoft is having to implement more draconian measures to keep the situation under control.
A couple of months back I wrote about a legal action by the daughter of Pakistan's founder, Mohammed Jinnah, to recover the Mumbai house (pictured) built by her father in which she spent many formative years and in which so much history was created. In 1944 talks between Jinnah and Gandhi about the formation of Pakistan were held at the sprawling property, located in the city's upscale Malabar Hill district.
Nadia Wadia is now 87 and spends most of her time in New York, but she has never given up hope of getting back Jinnah House, which the family lost after Partition in 1947. India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, sought to save the house out of respect for Jinnah and agreed to rent it out as a foreign consulate. But when Jinnah died in 1948, his will left the property to his sister, Fatima, the result of his anger at his daughter, Mrs Wadia, for marrying a non-Muslim. Yet Fatima had also been forced to move to Pakistan and having been declared an evacuee, her property - like that of other families - was taken over by the government.
Not only is Sony dropping the price of its 60GB PS3 – from £425 to £349 – it’s also discontinuing the model in favour of a 40GB version that offers gamers no backwards compatability. According to Sony, it’s all about "looking forwards not backwards". Meanwhile, in the US, the 60GB console is also being given the elbow but an 80GB monster will be taking its place.
The government has launched a review into the effects of violent games on children. TV psychologist Tanya Byron is heading up the research and will look at ways that the games industry can protect children more effectively. Expected to last 6 months, the review comes a day after the British Board of Film Classification refused a certificate for the ultra violent Manhunt 2 (pictured) for a second time.
We've all had items of electronic equipment that have died on us; satnavs that fail to respond when we stab the on switch with an agitated finger, computers which display persistent error messages on startup, and phones that turn off unexpectedly after emitting their very last irritating ringtone. "It's dead," we say, throwing up our hands in frustration as we discover that the thing is just out of warranty. These things are generally out of our control and are down to fragility, dodgy logic boards, or just "old age" (a miserable 18 months or so, what with the pace of technological change).
"Bricking" has the same result: a non-functioning lump useful only for stacking, or juggling.
But bricking is entirely the fault of the owners...
I remember getting broadband for the first time back in 2001; the terms and conditions of my connection prevented more than one computer from using it at any one time. For most people the word "router" still meant some kind of vicious woodworking tool that was best kept well away from expensive computer equipment.
How times have changed. Most home internet connections are now made via wireless routers which allow access from multiple machines, and they're so commonplace that in urban areas you can sit in a car on an average street and piggyback off half a dozen unsecured routers – not that I'd recommend it, as it can land you in trouble. Neither would I recommend leaving your wireless network unsecured, as it can offer a convenient method for strangers to access files on your computer.
But the spare capacity that we all have on our broadband connections can be harnessed for the good of others, and a Spanish company called FON announced on Friday that it's persuaded BT that its scheme for opening up that capacity is a good one. So, how does it work?
Six years ago next month, I was covering the UN General Assembly meeting in New York. It was George Bush's first such assembly and at the UN headquarters overlooking New York's East River, the meeting was taking place against the backdrop of the shocking terror attack that had been carried out two months earlier on the World Trade Centre, just a cab ride away. Among the 48 presidents and prime ministers and 114 foreign ministers who attended the meeting was General Pervez Musharraf, the man who has just secured another five years as head of Pakistan.
Controversially, Musharraf (pictured) has been reelected while still wearing his uniform and retaining his position as head of the country's powerful and hugely influential armed forces. Back in November 2001, Musharraf was a new recruit to George Bush's "war on terror", having been told the day after 9/11 - the message being passed through his intelligence chief who happened to be in Washington - that Pakistan had the choice of either acting as an uncompromising ally or else being considered an enemey. Musharraf realised he had little option but to sign up to Bush's military campaign, the first phase of which well was underway in the wilds of Afghanistan as the diplomats and leaders were meeting in New York.
Over the course of the weekend I attended a press conference that Musharraf gave. It was dominated by Pakistani journalists and I can't remember now what he said, but I remember coming away from the briefing thinking just how reasonable Musharraf sounded, how cultured and civilised he appeared. This image was rounded off by his sartorial choice that day; not a military dictator's army uniform of course, but a nicely cut, expensive-looking suit.
It's a common annoyance: you follow a web link, but it's dead. There's nothing there. With a rapidly evolving, ever-changing internet, people revamp their sites daily, reorganising files and moving them without warning. Few of those people are helpful enough to construct automatic redirects to take us from the old page to the new one, and it takes a while for the automatic search engine crawlers to discover that things have changed – and even longer for sites that are maintained by human beings. Wikipedia, for example, estimates that around 10% of its outbound links are broken in some way.
Recent Comments