CEOP show Maddie is missing on 30th April 2007

This is grim news, Magnum.

Seems like Portugal aren't playing their own tune but are dancing to the British.

canada12 wrote:

costello wrote:Resistor, I have to be honest here I don't understand anything IT technical, and still haven't got a clue. What I must applaud is your determination to prove your point and kudos to you. I have previously stated I am of the opinion this sorrowful saga was pre-planned, still am. I was intrigued with Canada12's post last night, if you have the time can you explain the one and two photograph issue of Madeleine.

Thanks Costello

Here's my question:

   Reply with quote

Re: CEOP show Maddie is missing on 30th April 2007

Post  canada12 Yesterday at 10:33 am
I've just posted an interesting query over on the other chat group.

The original screenshot that we saw of April 30 apparently showed the page as it was "captured" on April 30. It showed ONE PHOTO of Madeleine.

Here it is below:

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=646163802184537&set=gm.917000191695416&type=1&theater

We've now been told that this was an "error" and that it should have been a different date, after May 7.
The only trouble is, if you go to the link now, there are TWO PHOTOS of Madeleine on the page:

https://web.archive.org/web/20070513020901/http://www.ceop.gov.uk/mccann.html

So if the original April 30 link above was incorrect... where did the second photo of Madeleine go?
On what date was the second photo of Madeleine added?
Why doesn't the April 30 link show two photographs?
Shouldn't the new link only show one photo of Madeleine, if it's the April 30th link? Why is it showing two photos?

The answer to that one is simple, Canada, and I don't need to tell it to you, because you know it for yourself. They are two completely different pages. One is a later version of the other, with a second photo added (any maybe some other things). I think the April 30 one was a draft.

I would tend to think the trial in Portugal is less important than information this would provide, if true, to Operation Grange.

Hongkong Phooey wrote:

Magnum wrote:I would urge caution . The news from Portugal is not good. .It cannot be used by Amaral and the PJ.. .I am gutted

I will update you when I have it in writing  

Yourself and a poster on cmomm are both stating very similar, is it possible you have the same source. A further explanation of why this new evidence can't be used (as nobody has been prosecuted to date) will be interesting.

Because a good lawyer will find lots of cases that have used Wayback evidence, that has been accepted by the Courts, and that creates a Judicial Precedent.

Resistor wrote:

canada12 wrote:

costello wrote:Resistor, I have to be honest here I don't understand anything IT technical, and still haven't got a clue. What I must applaud is your determination to prove your point and kudos to you. I have previously stated I am of the opinion this sorrowful saga was pre-planned, still am. I was intrigued with Canada12's post last night, if you have the time can you explain the one and two photograph issue of Madeleine.

Thanks Costello

Here's my question:

   Reply with quote

Re: CEOP show Maddie is missing on 30th April 2007

Post  canada12 Yesterday at 10:33 am
I've just posted an interesting query over on the other chat group.

The original screenshot that we saw of April 30 apparently showed the page as it was "captured" on April 30. It showed ONE PHOTO of Madeleine.

Here it is below:

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=646163802184537&set=gm.917000191695416&type=1&theater

We've now been told that this was an "error" and that it should have been a different date, after May 7.
The only trouble is, if you go to the link now, there are TWO PHOTOS of Madeleine on the page:

https://web.archive.org/web/20070513020901/http://www.ceop.gov.uk/mccann.html

So if the original April 30 link above was incorrect... where did the second photo of Madeleine go?
On what date was the second photo of Madeleine added?
Why doesn't the April 30 link show two photographs?
Shouldn't the new link only show one photo of Madeleine, if it's the April 30th link? Why is it showing two photos?

The answer to that one is simple, Canada, and I don't need to tell it to you, because you know it for yourself.  They are two completely different pages.  One is a later version of the other, with a second photo added (any maybe some other things).  I think the April 30 one was a draft.

I agree with you totally. A draft that was stored on the server on April 30 and possibly forgotten about.

Dee Coy wrote:

Resistor wrote:Just looking in, I am really quite shocked that I have been mentioned in dispatches

For the date of the crawl to have been wrong, the server clock on WB server would have to have been wrong.  That is extremely unlikely, because server timers pick up their time from official sources, such as MSF in Cumbria.  It's referred to as an ITS (Internet Time Service).

In turn, the crawler software uses the server clock to timestamp things.  The timestamp is therefore the date/time of the server where the page is cached (stored) - not the time on the server where the page is held.  So if a page is held on a page in the US, but the crawler is operating from the UK, the timestamp will be in GMT (or BST, as the case may be).

So for a "glitch" in the time, the actual server itself would have to be wrongly set, and that means all the other pages cached on 30 April will be wrongly timestamped as well.

The three variables that Andrew has asked about look like Javascript variables that are just used for displaying things on the page.  They are a dynamic content that is embedded into the HTML, so they can change but the HTML around it does not, exactly like a dynamic news feed on a page.  Where do the values for these variables come from?  The timestamp as going by the server clock.  Unless someone has specifically gone in and manually changed them.  But there is no reason to do that - and why, especially, on one small page out of over three petabytes of archive.

So maybe it is a "recycled" page with a different name?  No.  That is not possible.  If the date of the crawl is correct, i.e. 30 April 2007, then a page called mccann.html must have existed at that point in time, in order to be found and cached.  There is no chance that it could have been called foxy.html or foobar.html or qwerty.html and later renamed.  Because then it would have been cached as foxy.html or whatever.  

How was this found out?  I have no idea.  I cannot imagine the incredible odds of this happening.  There are no hyperlinks to advertise it's presence, it was just sitting about loose on a server, completely unconnected to anything else, but the robot found it and cached it, exactly as it was designed to do.  Like dogs, bots don't lie.  They are tools, they don't have any subjective judgement, they do exactly as they are programmed to do, and they don't make mistakes.

An average simple little HTML page, even allowing for pictures, is about 1/2 a megabyte.  There are 1099511627776 megabytes in a petabyte, and Wayback holds over 3 pb of information (and rising).  So you can see the incredible odds of this ever coming to light at all.  I would love to know who found it, and in what circumstances - and please can I have six numbers for this week's Lotto.

   

Hi Resistor, and thanks for your persistance with this. I too think it's a bombshell - proper hard evidence.

I do have a query with the underlined bit. Last night I was using Wayback to have a poke around in Gerry's blogs, looking for fridge references (haven't found the page, yet, Wayback doesn't seem to have captured them all). But it would appear that the Find Madeleine site has had 2 different web names. Originally it was called "Bring Back Madeleine" and Gerry's blogs can be found by putting this URL into the Wayback machine:

http://www.bringmadeleinehome.com/blog/

However, the site was later renamed Find Madeleine and the blogs can also be found via this URL into Wayback:

http://www.findmadeleine.com/blog

The interesting thing is that both these addresses bring up the same pages. For example, if you seach both URLs via Wayback and open the result in each case for 2 October 2007, the same page is displayed:

First, using bringmadeleinehome https://web.archive.org/web/20071002071520/http://bringmadeleinehome.com/

and using findmadeleine https://web.archive.org/web/20071002040053/http://findmadeleine.com/

Captured pages have been saved by the crawler for the same site under different domain names.

Is this the same thing as you're referring to in your post?

So surely

That's an easy one, Dee Coy. They registered several domain names and one re-directs to the other. It's very common.
Go look up cuddlecat.co.uk on Wayback, that will open your eyes for you.

Resistor wrote:

Hongkong Phooey wrote:

Magnum wrote:I would urge caution . The news from Portugal is not good. .It cannot be used by Amaral and the PJ.. .I am gutted

I will update you when I have it in writing  

Yourself and a poster on cmomm are both stating very similar, is it possible you have the same source. A further explanation of why this new evidence can't be used (as nobody has been prosecuted to date) will be interesting.

Because a good lawyer will find lots of cases that have used Wayback evidence, that has been accepted by the Courts, and that creates a Judicial Precedent.

Hopefully Resistor. I really so want it to be true. .I will continue to allow the theory to be expanded.. It hasn't been debunked by Portugal merely side stepped. .

I did some research on the legal aspect last night. Some countries accept Wayback evidence as being irrefutable, and some don't. In legal terms, this is a very new area of the law and as yet there's no consistent way of treating it, quite simply because a lot of courts or police forces don't really understand it. So I really wouldn't like to commit myself as to whether this evidence would be admissable in Portugal or not. I don't even think there's been such a case under Scots Law where it's been tested, and if there had been I would have probably read about it from a professional point of view.

Resistor wrote:

That's an easy one, Dee Coy.  They registered several domain names and one re-directs to the other.  It's very common.
Go look up cuddlecat.co.uk on Wayback, that will open your eyes for you.  

Ah, thanks.

Actually, that reminds of of something. Wasn't there talk at one point that the Madeleine website was registered before the disappearance, too? Same as the CEOP one, then, it would seem - allegedly, of course. I'm off to do some digging.

In the absence of a thorough investigation and explanation by the company, I can't see how any allegation can be refuted at this stage.

Magnum wrote:

Resistor wrote:

Hongkong Phooey wrote:

Magnum wrote:I would urge caution . The news from Portugal is not good. .It cannot be used by Amaral and the PJ.. .I am gutted

I will update you when I have it in writing  

Yourself and a poster on cmomm are both stating very similar, is it possible you have the same source. A further explanation of why this new evidence can't be used (as nobody has been prosecuted to date) will be interesting.

Because a good lawyer will find lots of cases that have used Wayback evidence, that has been accepted by the Courts, and that creates a Judicial Precedent.

Hopefully Resistor. I really so want it to be true. .I will continue to allow the theory to be expanded.. It hasn't been debunked by Portugal merely side stepped. .

Why are you 'allowing' anything?

You may be thinking about the Little Online Shop of Horrors that had (c) 2006 at the bottom of it. I don't think there's any big mystery about that one, either. It was written with a Dreamweaver Template with a default date of 2006 (either Dreamweaver 4 or Dreamweaver MX, I forget which) and wee Callum was either too careless or lazy to change the date. I know that Macromedia Dreamweaver was used because all the default settings were still there when you opened it up to look at the source code.

I bet they didn't even pay for the Dreamweaver either - it was a very expensive piece of software for a bunch of schoolkids to have, but it was commonly used in schools for web design courses. IIRC they stopped using Dreamweaver around the time that Macromedia were bought out by Adobe, and the price got even more expensive. Macromedia used to have what was called a site licence - places like schools and colleges got a hefty discount for buying multiple copies. But Adobe made them pay for each licence individually, and one licence cost several hundred pounds. So a lot of schools and other establishments simply did away with it, and went with something else, purely on the grounds of cost.

Interestingly enough, around about that time, the Find Maddie website changed from the Dreamweaver template to a different template. I forget the name of it now, but it came from a CD on the cover of PC Plus magazine, price £5.99. I remember making a lengthy critique of it at the time on a previous forum, and quite a few other technically minded people had spotted it too.

The McCanns and their retinue really do not like spending their own money!

Hongkong Phooey wrote:

Magnum wrote:

Resistor wrote:

Hongkong Phooey wrote:

Magnum wrote:I would urge caution . The news from Portugal is not good. .It cannot be used by Amaral and the PJ.. .I am gutted

I will update you when I have it in writing  

Yourself and a poster on cmomm are both stating very similar, is it possible you have the same source. A further explanation of why this new evidence can't be used (as nobody has been prosecuted to date) will be interesting.

Because a good lawyer will find lots of cases that have used Wayback evidence, that has been accepted by the Courts, and that creates a Judicial Precedent.

Hopefully Resistor. I really so want it to be true. .I will continue to allow the theory to be expanded.. It hasn't been debunked by Portugal merely side stepped. .

Why are you 'allowing' anything?

It is just facebook page I run. Nothing to do with here x

Resistor wrote:You may be thinking about the Little Online Shop of Horrors that had (c) 2006 at the bottom of it.  I don't think there's any big mystery about that one, either.  It was written with a Dreamweaver Template with a default date of 2006 (either Dreamweaver 4 or Dreamweaver MX, I forget which) and wee Callum was either too careless or lazy to change the date.  I know that Macromedia Dreamweaver was used because all the default settings were still there when you opened it up to look at the source code.  

I bet they didn't even pay for the Dreamweaver either - it was a very expensive piece of software for a bunch of schoolkids to have, but it was commonly used in schools for web design courses.  IIRC they stopped using Dreamweaver around the time that Macromedia were bought out by Adobe, and the price got even more expensive.  Macromedia used to have what was called a site licence - places like schools and colleges got a hefty discount for buying multiple copies.  But Adobe made them pay for each licence individually, and one licence cost several hundred pounds.  So a lot of schools and other establishments simply did away with it, and went with something else, purely on the grounds of cost.

Interestingly enough, around about that time, the Find Maddie website changed from the Dreamweaver template to a different template.  I forget the name of it now, but it came from a CD on the cover of PC Plus magazine, price £5.99.  I remember making a lengthy critique of it at the time on a previous forum, and quite a few other technically minded people had spotted it too.  

The McCanns and their retinue really do not like spending their own money!

Thanks once more, Resistor - saved me a job!

Just thought I'd reiterate my position on this CEOP thing.  I also have many years of experience as a software developer, having worked my way up to Lead Programmer at various global companies and have managed large teams and codebases.  I also have a First class honours degree in IT and Computing, and was a member of MENSA until I got fed up of paying the annual fee for a magazine.  I wouldn't bother to mention this normally, but as experience would appear to be relevant to this discussion I'll have to show mine.

I looked in detail at the HTML + Javascript of both the mccann page and the home page dated 30 April 2007.  I am 100% certain that those pages were not crawled at that time, but much later, probably end of October 2007 onwards.  I've already given evidence relating to that, but I doubt that anybody has read it.

The pages that I looked at absolutely had no dynamic content.  The content was delivered at the time of the crawl by the webserver in question.  That content referenced news headlines that would not appear on the homepage again until late October - and when they did appear, they were the same, word for word.

Additionally, the home-page of 30 April 2007 was identical to the home-page of 13 October 2007, except for one news headline from late October which clearly could not have appeared on the 13 October page.  All the other versions of the home-page were in format and content very different.  Therefore, it looks very clearly to me that the home-page dated 30 April 2007 came after the home-page of 13 October 2007, and therefore must have been crawled at this much later time.

Every other version of the home-page had *NO DYNAMIC CONTENT* at all.  The headlines were all in the past, prior to the crawl date.  I've asked people to check this for themselves, but it seems as if nobody is interested.

This forum and others is regularly full of posters stating that they want the 'truth'.  Not in this case though it seems - not if the truth is less exciting.

ETA - I really hope GA has the good sense not to allow this anywhere near his appeal.  If he seeks professional advice, it will be the same as I have given here.  The Met will have the best technical advice you can get, so don't expect them to get excited about this 'smoking gun' any time soon.  And no, it won't be due to the 'sinister power of the McCanns'.

-----

To anybody that believes that I'm applying bias to my conclusions, consider this:  when I first read this story and looked at the CEOP McCann page, my immediate response was that this must be true and the time-stamp correct, for reasons similar to the ones that Resistor has given in this thread.  However, I have fought my way to this particular place in my career by being thorough and meticulous, and so looked into the situation in fine detail.  What I found led me to be 100% certain that the time-stamp of 30 April 2007 was absolutely incorrect for the home-page, and therefore any other pages with the same time-stamp should be looked at with great suspicion.  I am so certain of this, I would testify as such in court as an expert witness.

-----

Finally, I would be very interested to find out what caused 'Stevo' to discover these 'dodgy' URLs, after 8 years.  Flash of intuition?

So WLBTS is the time stamp a computing error or has someone fiddled with it? ( by the way I believe the LP to be real as well....its in the thread!)

It looks as if mischief is being made IMO.

WLBTS wrote:

Additionally, the home-page of 30 April 2007 was identical to the home-page of 13 October 2007, except for one news headline from late October which clearly could not have appeared on the 13 October page.  All the other versions of the home-page were in format and content very different.  Therefore, it looks very clearly to me that the home-page dated 30 April 2007 came after the home-page of 13 October 2007, and therefore must have been crawled at this much later time.

But that's not true, WLBTS...

Here is the screenshot of the original page from April:

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=646163802184537&set=gm.917000191695416&type=1&theater

How many photos of Madeleine do you see?
One.

If you go to the "revised" link now, how many photos of Madeleine do you see?

https://web.archive.org/web/20070513020901/http://www.ceop.gov.uk/mccann.html

Two.

If you click on any of the links going forward on WBM for that page, how many photos of Madeleine do you see?

Two.

I repeat my earlier questions.

If the original April 30 link above was incorrect... where did the second photo of Madeleine go?
On what date was the second photo of Madeleine added?
Why doesn't the original April 30 link show two photographs, if the original April 30 link was incorrect and reflects a page from the future, all copies of which show two photographs?

Bampots wrote:So WLBTS is the time stamp a computing error or has someone fiddled with it? ( by the way I believe the LP to be real as well....its in the thread!)

It is far more difficult to state categorically what has caused an error than to show that an error has occurred. This is something every software engineer deals with on a daily basis - we all have bug trackers that have been populated by users who are aware that there is a bug, but they need us programmers to track it down and fix it. That can be a lengthy, difficult process, and in this case I don't have access to WBM's source code as it was in 2007.

canada12 wrote:

WLBTS wrote:

Additionally, the home-page of 30 April 2007 was identical to the home-page of 13 October 2007, except for one news headline from late October which clearly could not have appeared on the 13 October page.  All the other versions of the home-page were in format and content very different.  Therefore, it looks very clearly to me that the home-page dated 30 April 2007 came after the home-page of 13 October 2007, and therefore must have been crawled at this much later time.

But that's not true, WLBTS...

Here is the screenshot of the original page from April:

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=646163802184537&set=gm.917000191695416&type=1&theater

How many photos of Madeleine do you see?
One.

If you go to the "revised" link now, how many photos of Madeleine do you see?

https://web.archive.org/web/20070513020901/http://www.ceop.gov.uk/mccann.html

Two.

If you click on any of the links going forward on WBM for that page, how many photos of Madeleine do you see?

Two.

I repeat my earlier questions.

If the original April 30 link above was incorrect... where did the second photo of Madeleine go?
On what date was the second photo of Madeleine added?
Why doesn't the original April 30 link show two photographs, if the original April 30 link was incorrect and reflects a page from the future, all copies of which show two photographs?

Yes it is true.  You've shown screenshots of the mccann page, I was talking about the home-page, which is absolutely clear in the passage you have quoted. I used the phrase 'home-page' 5 times.

Apologies. I was reading quickly and thought you were referring to the McCann page.
Do you have an explanation for my questions?
Many thanks..

canada12 wrote:
Apologies. I was reading quickly and thought you were referring to the McCann page.
Do you have an explanation for my questions?
Many thanks..

No worries c12

To give an answer to your question about the number of photographs, I would say that I need to inspect the source code for that page.  Unfortunately I didn't have the foresight to keep a local copy.

But I can inspect the next page's HTML, the one that has two photographs.  The part of the HTML pertaining to the two photographs looks like this:

<p style="padding: 0 0 6px 0">
<img src="madeleine_01.jpg" alt="Photograph of Madeleine McCann" style="width:180px" />
<img src="madeleine_02.jpg" alt="Photograph of Madeleine McCann" style="width:180px" />
</p>

Comparing this HTML to the screenshot in the Facebook post, the layout of that page appears to fit this HTML paragraph element, except that the second photograph is not visible.

I notice that when I go to the later page on WBM, the second photograph takes a second or two to appear.  So for a very short time, the page looks exactly the same as the one with one photograph, if only for a second or so.

Here's what I mean, this is a screenshot that I just took of the page dated 13 May 2007:

How many photos do you see? Also notice that the 'Report Abuse' button hasn't yet appeared either, and I gave it a second or so.

Additionally, caution is needed regarding the content of those two photographs.  When trying to access the relative URLs for those photographs, this is what Wayback Machine retrieves:

https://web.archive.org/web/20070809213612/http://www.ceop.gov.uk/madeleine_01.jpg
https://web.archive.org/web/20070708201605/http://www.ceop.gov.uk/madeleine_02.jpg

As you can see, the time-stamps (according to the folder naming convention) are much later than the time-stamp of the page itself.

WLBTS wrote:Here's what I mean, this is a screenshot that I just took of the page dated 13 May 2007:

How many photos do you see?  Also notice that the 'Report Abuse' button hasn't yet appeared either, and I gave it a second or so.

Yes I just checked that small delay for myself. I do have to concede you're right :-)

canada12 wrote:
Yes I just checked that small delay for myself. I do have to concede you're right :-)

Additionally, note that in the Facebook screenshot the alt text 'Photograph of Madeleine McCann' appears at the bottom of where the second photograph should be.  This indicates that the image element was indeed present in the HTML for the second photograph, but the web-server failed to deliver the image file for some reason.