CEOP show Maddie is missing on 30th April 2007

If the 30 April page mccann.html did not exist when Wayback crawled it, then it wouldn't have returned anything and there would have been nothing to archive!

I have been out for most of the day but I just ran a little test, that might be of some interest. Somebody has told me that people are questioning whether Wayback can pick up orphan pages, i.e. pages loose on servers that don't have hyperlinks to them. That is a very good question. I just checked with one of my own sites and yes, it does. I don't know how it does it exactly, without seeing the code - I suspect it polls the server log, probably an XML file - and just lists everything in there. There is a page on one of my own sites, hosted by 1&1 actually, that has never, ever been live or linked to, as it was only created for testing purposes, inside a folder and not intended for public consumption. But it's there.

It doesn't show in Google because the Google crawler must work in a different way. I know that Google looks for metatags in a page and indexes them, then it looks for hyperlinks in the page, then goes there and repeats the process. So Google would be unlikely to find orphan pages that have no links to them IMO. But then I wouldn't expect the two to work in the same way anyway, as they are intended to do completely different things and they don't retrieve or store data in the same way. I would love to see the Wayback code that does this, purely from a technical POV.

I don't know how this helps, or even if it helps, the more I look into all of this, I am just ending up with more questions than answers. What I do find very interesting is that ridicule, abuse and insults haven't worked, so legal threats are now being wheeled out.

Well, get this. I will continue to post my opinion as I see fit. I'm not shutting up, or going away. I have been commenting on this case for the past eight years and it will take a damn sight more than a few nasty comments and threats to make me stop now. And even if I were to stop - there are others. Lots of others. This genie is not going back in the bottle any time soon.

Great post and am with you on that  , I am going to see this through. .Steve Marsden is currently dong further research on his finding and will post when he is satisfied ..

I will post the link to here when that happens. .

I have "known" Steve on various forums for the past 7 or 8 years. He is a software developer too. I would be really interested in reading his research on this. I know he has come in for a lot of stick in the past over some of his "facts", but at least in this case, nobody can accuse him of making stuff up. Because up until 3 nights ago, anyone could go and see the primary source for themselves. I am really kicking myself now for not having the foresight to save it in it's entirety. You'd think after 8 years of subterfuge, whooshings, vanishings and manipulation, that I would have known better. Duh.

Resistor wrote:I have "known" Steve on various forums for the past 7 or 8 years.  He is a software developer too.  I would be really interested in reading his research on this.  I know he has come in for a lot of stick in the past over some of his "facts", but at least in this case, nobody can accuse him of making stuff up.  Because up until 3 nights ago, anyone could go and see the primary source for themselves.  I am really kicking myself now for not having the foresight to save it in it's entirety.  You'd think after 8 years of subterfuge, whooshings, vanishings and manipulation, that I would have known better.  Duh.

Thank you Resistor I really do appreciate your support.. You can check us out here  ,but I will bring his finished report to you as soon as I get it .Interesting that the pro McCanns are really not happy with this research but continue to attempt to discredit us. . .It may amount to nothing but am really hoping that this will at the very least be an indicator that Maddie's demise was known to have happened before May 3rd..

https://www.facebook.com/groups/jkjoannekilcoyne/?ref=bookmarks

Just did another wee test.  On the mccann.html page from 30 April, there are several hyperlinks, leading to SOCA and other CEOP pages.  So I thought I would go and investigate some of these, as it occurred to me that maybe some of them linked back to the mccann.html page.

As an example, I looked at another CEOP page, called downloads.html (this is not McCann specific, just contains links to generic posters and screensavers) and it too was crawled on April 30, at 11:58:03 - exact date and time as mccann.html.  

But lo! and behold! clicking on the pointer for April 30 takes you to April 28!



Same for T&C, Accessibility, Contact Us, Sitemap, References and every single mirrored page in Welsh.  There has been an entry for April 30 which has now been shifted to the next nearest date - some are earlier in April, some are into May, one is into June.

And again, WBMs own Javascript confirms that it was there -



I am not entirely sure what this proves, but I am sure it must prove something.  Even if it's only that somebody at WBM has been very, very busy on behalf of CEOP over the past couple of days.  

If all of these resources were in a folder /web/20070430115803, moving the folder somewhere else in a single action would not take much work.  If Wayback Machine have decided that the 20070430115803 timestamp is in error, then moving the entire folder makes sense.  Whatever their internal format is, we're talking about a hierarchical structure here (not a particularly tall one though) - moving whatever is grouped beneath 20070430115803 would seem to be an easy task.  It doesn't speak to me of WBM being 'busy', just taking the simple action of moving a folder until they can figure out what to do with it.  The redirects occur automatically because the 20070430115803 resources are not present.

Again apologies if this is nothing but when you look at the Ceop main page calendar of crawls you get the first May date as 14th. Yet typing in mccann.html into the url gives a first date in May of 13th.
There is a 27 Apr on the main page which is what the 30th reverts to but on the mccann page there is no 27th just 30th but clicking that takes you to 13th May.
Don't waste valuable time if it is nonsense.

It's not nonsense at all Chirpy. It proves, as much as anything else, that the records have been manipulated.

As the indexing is an automatic process, when the next big re-index happens, all of that will have gone and the April 30 blue dots will disappear. Anyone looking at it in, say, 6 months time wouldn't be any the wiser that anything untoward had even happened.

But why this hasty cover-up, that is what I want to know. At the very least it looks highly suspicious. If that had been my code, I would have changed it but also issued an apology for the error, and an explanation. The fact they haven't even done that, but just hoped that nobody would notice, leads me to believe that somebody, somewhere, has something to hide.

If the code for the entire point of their existence - saving things at a specific time - is wrong, where is the major bug fix for it? Has that been released yet? Are they even working on it? Does anybody know?

Jim Gamble on Panorama Australia - Madeleine, The Last Hope - 17th May 2012.

Kerry O'Brien - Jim Gamble, let's get one obvious question out of the way, first-up: from everything you know personally about the McCanns and the case, do you believe they had anything to do with Madeleine's disappearance?

Jim Gamble - if it ever came out that either of the McCanns were involved in this, I will be absolutely shocked.

So, not "No, I believe that the McCanns had nothing to do with Madeleine's disappearance", then.

But "I will be absolutely shocked if it ever comes out." "I would be shocked if either one of them were ever proved to have been involved."

What's Gamble saying about all this Wayback CEOP stuff, then? Anything? Maybe he is too "shocked".



Thanks to Abduction or Scam group on FB for this little gem.

I'm still quite astounded that an entity like WBM [based in the US] would tamper with files that could potentially have a link to an ongoing police investigation in the UK.

However, having said that, I'm also equally persuaded that if the police investigation in the UK needed any information about these files, they should be able to access the full dossier of information from WBM if required.

And I still want to believe this is something OG was aware of even before we were, and they have been watching what's been happening, making notes, and investigating.

canada12 wrote:I'm still quite astounded that an entity like WBM [based in the US] would tamper with files that could potentially have a link to an ongoing police investigation in the UK.

However, having said that, I'm also equally persuaded that if the police investigation in the UK needed any information about these files, they should be able to access the full dossier of information from WBM if required.

And I still want to believe this is something OG was aware of even before we were, and they have been watching what's been happening, making notes, and investigating.

Let's hope they have been waiting to see who did something about this and the audit trail leads in a certain direction. Living in hope.

chirpyinsect wrote:

canada12 wrote:I'm still quite astounded that an entity like WBM [based in the US] would tamper with files that could potentially have a link to an ongoing police investigation in the UK.

However, having said that, I'm also equally persuaded that if the police investigation in the UK needed any information about these files, they should be able to access the full dossier of information from WBM if required.

And I still want to believe this is something OG was aware of even before we were, and they have been watching what's been happening, making notes, and investigating.

Let's hope they have been waiting to see who did something about this and the audit trail leads in a certain direction. Living in hope.

Makes sense to me. But then I'm an eternal optimist.

canada12 wrote:

chirpyinsect wrote:

canada12 wrote:I'm still quite astounded that an entity like WBM [based in the US] would tamper with files that could potentially have a link to an ongoing police investigation in the UK.

However, having said that, I'm also equally persuaded that if the police investigation in the UK needed any information about these files, they should be able to access the full dossier of information from WBM if required.

And I still want to believe this is something OG was aware of even before we were, and they have been watching what's been happening, making notes, and investigating.

Let's hope they have been waiting to see who did something about this and the audit trail leads in a certain direction. Living in hope.

Makes sense to me. But then I'm an eternal optimist.

I can't imagine WBM removing anything based on the say so of TM or JG. They just don't wield that much power. Even an instruction from the UK police would require some sort of official request. So, IF they have whooshed it, who would be powerful enough to get an archive company to basically discredit past court cases and leave themselves open to possible law suits.

Resistor wrote:It's not nonsense at all Chirpy.  It proves, as much as anything else, that the records have been manipulated.

As the indexing is an automatic process, when the next big re-index happens, all of that will have gone and the April 30 blue dots will disappear.  Anyone looking at it in, say, 6 months time wouldn't be any the wiser that anything untoward had even happened.  

But why this hasty cover-up, that is what I want to know.  At the very least it looks highly suspicious.  If that had been my code, I would have changed it but also issued an apology for the error, and an explanation.  The fact they haven't even done that, but just hoped that nobody would notice, leads me to believe that somebody, somewhere, has something to hide.

If the code for the entire point of their existence - saving things at a specific time - is wrong, where is the major bug fix for it?  Has that been released yet?  Are they even working on it?  Does anybody know?  

Whilst my own opinion is that the WBM found a McCann site on 30/04 WLBTS brought up the point of future stories being on that page. Has anyone found another page with similar traits, most posted here or cmomm are of 30/04 to prove nothing was wrong on that day but none display any future events.

chirpyinsect wrote:

canada12 wrote:

chirpyinsect wrote:

canada12 wrote:I'm still quite astounded that an entity like WBM [based in the US] would tamper with files that could potentially have a link to an ongoing police investigation in the UK.

However, having said that, I'm also equally persuaded that if the police investigation in the UK needed any information about these files, they should be able to access the full dossier of information from WBM if required.

And I still want to believe this is something OG was aware of even before we were, and they have been watching what's been happening, making notes, and investigating.

Let's hope they have been waiting to see who did something about this and the audit trail leads in a certain direction. Living in hope.

Makes sense to me. But then I'm an eternal optimist.

I can't imagine WBM removing anything based on the say so of TM or JG. They just don't wield that much power. Even an instruction from the UK police would require some sort of official request. So, IF they have whooshed it, who would be powerful enough to get an archive company to basically discredit past court cases and leave themselves open to possible law suits.

I can. Not necessarily them personally, but if the secret services are involved, it could well extend to the CIA/FBI. Not only that but we know how quickly CR can threaten litigation.

Would it be possible because someone was concerned about Maddie or the cats file?

Mimi wrote:

chirpyinsect wrote:

canada12 wrote:

chirpyinsect wrote:

canada12 wrote:I'm still quite astounded that an entity like WBM [based in the US] would tamper with files that could potentially have a link to an ongoing police investigation in the UK.

However, having said that, I'm also equally persuaded that if the police investigation in the UK needed any information about these files, they should be able to access the full dossier of information from WBM if required.

And I still want to believe this is something OG was aware of even before we were, and they have been watching what's been happening, making notes, and investigating.

Let's hope they have been waiting to see who did something about this and the audit trail leads in a certain direction. Living in hope.

Makes sense to me. But then I'm an eternal optimist.

I can't imagine WBM removing anything based on the say so of TM or JG. They just don't wield that much power. Even an instruction from the UK police would require some sort of official request. So, IF they have whooshed it, who would be powerful enough to get an archive company to basically discredit past court cases and leave themselves open to possible law suits.

I can. Not necessarily them personally, but if the secret services are involved, it could well extend to the CIA/FBI.  Not only that but we know how quickly CR can threaten litigation.

Kind of where I was going Mimi.Don't know about the CR bit as that would take time to set up and would it even apply in the US?

Sometime over the last couple of days I seem to remember seeing an image of an email that WBM had sent to someone which gave dates for the home page and mccann.html. Has anyone got a copy of it?

AndyB wrote:  QSometime over the last couple of days I seem to remember seeing an image of an email that WBM had sent to someone which gave dates for the home page and mccann.html. Has anyone got a copy of it?

Never worked out how to post images on a tablet but go to Face Book Madeleine McCann Abduction or Scam, scroll to Steve Marsden on 17 June and it is there. Email was sent to Isabel McFarlane. Or you could check her tweets.

If this were true then the Secret services would be the ones to pull the strings. Gambles background in NI certainly points to his mastery of the Dark Arts IMO. It would be no way absurd to think the American secret services controlled the Wayback site, who else would use this service to its full potential. After all lets refer to its inspiration.....

The name Wayback Machine was chosen as a droll reference to a plot device in an animated cartoon series, The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. In it, Mr. Peabody and Sherman routinely used a time machine called the "WABAC machine" (pronounced "Wayback") to witness, participate in, and, more often than not, alter famous events in history.^[3]


"To witness,participate in,and,more often than not, alter famous events in history."

chirpyinsect wrote:

canada12 wrote:

chirpyinsect wrote:

canada12 wrote:I'm still quite astounded that an entity like WBM [based in the US] would tamper with files that could potentially have a link to an ongoing police investigation in the UK.

However, having said that, I'm also equally persuaded that if the police investigation in the UK needed any information about these files, they should be able to access the full dossier of information from WBM if required.

And I still want to believe this is something OG was aware of even before we were, and they have been watching what's been happening, making notes, and investigating.

Let's hope they have been waiting to see who did something about this and the audit trail leads in a certain direction. Living in hope.

Makes sense to me. But then I'm an eternal optimist.

I can't imagine WBM removing anything based on the say so of TM or JG. They just don't wield that much power. Even an instruction from the UK police would require some sort of official request. So, IF they have whooshed it, who would be powerful enough to get an archive company to basically discredit past court cases and leave themselves open to possible law suits.

I can. Any web search will reveal just how litigious the McCanns are. Wayback just don't want the hassle, expense and bad publicity of being sued. Just like Amazon with Pat Brown's book.

chirpyinsect wrote:

AndyB wrote:  QSometime over the last couple of days I seem to remember seeing an image of an email that WBM had sent to someone which gave dates for the home page and mccann.html. Has anyone got a copy of it?

Never worked out how to post images on a tablet but go to Face Book Madeleine McCann Abduction or Scam, scroll to Steve Marsden on 17 June and it is there. Email was sent to Isabel McFarlane. Or you could check her tweets.

Thanks. That's the first one, which confirms that 30/04/2007 is the correct date. I was after a subsequent email that gave much later, and different, dates for the homepage and mccann.html

AndyB wrote:

chirpyinsect wrote:

AndyB wrote:  QSometime over the last couple of days I seem to remember seeing an image of an email that WBM had sent to someone which gave dates for the home page and mccann.html. Has anyone got a copy of it?

Never worked out how to post images on a tablet but go to Face Book Madeleine McCann Abduction or Scam, scroll to Steve Marsden on 17 June and it is there. Email was sent to Isabel McFarlane. Or you could check her tweets.

Thanks. That's the first one, which confirms that 30/04/2007 is the correct date. I was after a subsequent email that gave much later, and different, dates for the homepage and mccann.html

Ah then look at The Madeleine McCann Controversy Robert Santos 17 June. Go to comments. Zora McCartney has reproduced the second email
Hope that helps.

Thanks chirpy.



So what WBM seem to be saying is that:
30/04/2007 no archive of CEOP was taken

31/07/2007 mccann.html was archived from the CEOP site (perhaps with the homepage as well) and this was misfiled as having been archived at exactly 3 seconds past 11:58 on 30/04/2007

07/10/2007 the CEOP home page was archived and this was misfiled as having been archived at exactly the same time.

This doesn't sound very plausible to me, not with the timestamps being identical. Besides, by 07/10/2007 mccann.html was linked from the home page (1) so it should have been archived but it isn't there. What happened to it? And another thing, the home page archive for 07/10/2007 exists and so clearly wasn't misfiled as 30/04 unless they're saying it was filed correctly AND misfiled at the same time. It just doesn't ring true for me

ETA (1) No it isn't, at least I can't find a link to it in the archive

I have been chewing over how Wayback found the mccann.html page in the first place, if it is an "orphan" page. This will annoy me until I have figured it out. I have some ideas, so this may well be a lengthy post (apologies in advance), but I know that some of the other tecccies are reading this forum and maybe they can help us out here.

I don't think Wayback works the same way as Google, because it returns completely different results. Google needs hyperlinks to be able to find pages. As far as we know, there were no hyperlinks to mccann.html on 30 April. For the moment, let's stick to the Google (simple) method, anyway.

When I build a page, I test it, to make sure all the pictures render, the javascript works, the Flash works and all the links work. I test it in isolation, and in conjunction with other pages. I think it's pretty safe to say that the author of mccann.html would have done pretty much the same.

So did a link to mccann.html exist on another page, for testing purposes, and was subsequently removed? And did the WB crawler, incredibly and fortuitously, catch it in that testing window, and index it?

Or was there really a whistleblower, as was suggested a couple of pages back? Someone in the multimedia department who saw what was going on and knew that it was wrong, but were too scared to speak out. So they inserted their own little spanner in the works somewhere, hoping that it would be picked up. And it has.

Or a trainee developer, trying to be helpful, that didn't really understand that this was not meant to be public.

I looked at the mccann.html page again and my testing one to see what the similarities and differences are, because both are apparently "orphans" and shouldn't have been found.

1. Both were sitting around as part of a domain, on a server that had been crawled.

2. Neither had links leading to them, from anywhere else (we think). But both had links leading from them, so strictly speaking, they weren't orphans. They were connected to something.

When you click on a hyperlink, and it takes you to a new page, the new page receives something called a referer, which it stores in a log. The referer is the page you came from, and a referer log entry would have been created when the page was tested. So a hyperlink to the supposedly orphaned page does exist - it's just not visible, or in the "usual" place. Can crawlers access referer logs? I don't know. But Stevo might.

3. mccann.html was created using some sort of multimedia authoring package (IMO). test.htm was knocked up in 5 minutes using my tool of choice for small projects - Notepad++. Some HTML4 with a bit of Javascript thrown in, referring to a JS file on a completely different site. Not much similarity there, then. BUT -

4. Some web authoring packages automatically add new pages to a Sitemap file, whether they have hyperlinks in them or not. The hosting package I had at that time with 1&1 did that too. Whenever you uploaded anything with an html/htm extension to the domain, it got automatically added in to the sitemap. Maybe the crawler just indexed the sitemap file. (In fact the new package I use with 1&1 still does that, but at least you now have the option to "hide" things from it, or password protect them, but those are fairly recent innovations).

5. Servers have logs, that lists every webpage uploaded to them. You can buy software that accesses those XML logs, which will show every page, linked in or not. It's quite common for webmasters of huge, long established sites to use this type of software for the exact purpose of finding orphan pages, so that they can either drag them back in or remove them completely. Maybe Wayback uses something like that, it would certainly be in their interests to do so if their business mission is to provide a complete record for things like police and legal cases.

There are probably a million or more possibilities that I haven't even begun to think of. Like I said already, every question that gets raised generates even more questions, more questions than answers. My head is sore now and I am spending so much time trying to figure this out that I am now neglecting other things that I ought to be doing instead.

I will leave you with one very important thought though. Wayback have taken at least four days, and counting, to come up with any sort of credible explanation. IMO the longer they leave it, the more suspicious it looks. Why not just say "the server broke down and when it came back up, it had reset itself to the wrong time. X, Y and Z domains are all affected. We apologise for the inconvenience". It's not that hard. IF that, or something else like it, is really what happened.